Tileable Wasteless Nuclear setup (v5)

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Bonaducci
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Tileable Wasteless Nuclear setup (v5)

Post by Bonaducci »

Hi, as I mentioned in previous topic, I used, adjusted and tested new nuclear setup first created by @Aeternus. I'd like to share my variant packed in one blueprint book including template for trenches and all factory parts.

I won't repeat everything @Aeternus already mentioned in his topic, you can take a look there for original version: Tileable Nuclear setup (v4)

Now to the point. The differences:
- Slightly bigger buffer tanks mostly to ensure fuel efficiency under little load.
- Changed latch mechanism to automatically reset in case of undefined state (undefined state lead to fast blinking lights and not starting).
- Because of fixed latch, does not require priming. Place it, connect to grid, put fuel on input belt. That's it.
- To avoid starvation when only one side of belt it fed I ensured only one of them is used. It limits length of this plant but is still huge. Reactor burns for 200s and red belt has 30 items/s. It means that current limit is 6000 reactors.
- Roboports placed alongside plant. Now you just need power and connection to your roboports, rest will build up automatically. Also each extension will be automatic and any fixed will be made by robots as whole plant is covered by construction zone.
- Added some tiles so it is easier to align new reactor segments and looks better. You can built it without flooring by disabling it in blueprint.

This factory looks almost the same as original one, so I'll not post any photos.

Side notes:
- Remember that control side and generators have independent grid. In case you want to power controls separately from backup power (solar etc), you can do that. Otherwise just connect them all.
- The best place for this plant is long and narrow trench of water. There are only two trenches near each other in the middle of setup. To see what requires landfilling, place template blueprint with central flooring. Two tile hazard concrete shows place where you should fill trenches for heatpipes. You can also use it first to see how far apart those trenches are.
- Plant will only start when all reactor pair (on each side) have 6 fuel cells in total. One side of belt fits 4 of them, so this way at least 2 cells are present on each belt. Again, plant already ensures one side of belt is used.
- Does not require requester chests, everything fed by belts.

Controls:
- Green light is ready state. It will start reactors as soon as possible.
- Red light means fuel shut off. On each reactor side pair you have one red light. It will light up when not enough fuel is present or waste fuel cells are blocked.
- Yellow light means reactor running.
- Cyan light is steam buffer filled. It will prevent starting reactor until steam falls below threshold causing red state.
- You can manually shut fuel off with constant combinator placed in control panel. It sends externally red signal.

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Gouldukat
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Re: Tileable Wasteless Nuclear setup (v5)

Post by Gouldukat »

This is better ratio and full GW of power out of the plant, it can scale up to 10k reactors and still sucks out all GW of power

https://pastebin.com/JwptRqyb
https://pastebin.com/EzW7rwZT

I will watch yours and steal the latch reset ;-p

thank you
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Bonaducci
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Re: Tileable Wasteless Nuclear setup (v5)

Post by Bonaducci »

Looks like it has 4 more boiler per reactor but much less steam buffer. I think mine has a bit too much buffer but I wanted to make sure it will not waste any of it when power draw is low. Second difference is buffer separation. Setup I used already had doubled buffers. One should be always full, second one is to hold any spare steam and based on that it starts reactors.

Anyways I don't know exactly what is max output of this plant. I'll test it when I have such high draw but now I play on new map once again so I use half of reactor for now.
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Re: Tileable Wasteless Nuclear setup (v5)

Post by mrvn »

Don't overlook the energy stored as heat. It's perfectly fine to have full steam tanks and the reactor heating up to 998°C before fuel runs out. And adding heat pipes anywhere there is space adds to that buffer.
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Re: Tileable Wasteless Nuclear setup (v5)

Post by Gouldukat »

Tileable Wasteless Nuclear setup (v6) godlike final iteration :-p

https://pastebin.com/VfQLnLv5

Found a better way to latch, and found better ways for everything I've notice in testing under different loads, it will never go over 999 temp, and it will never slump down energy when run cold for sometimes and asked to crank up to 100% (small builds under 10 reactors may still have the problem, to avoid it play with the value of premonition of usage in the logics gate)

It will cover some spike in power demand, it is rounded up in everything ! it will max out small reactor and it will still max out insane builds, done tested it up over 360 reactors, and is on paper balanced for over 10000 !

The control logic it is complex, if needed i will spend time doing a manual, but if some other person want to cover it is better, i like more doing builds then explaining it :-p

It can be cut in pieces and relocate parte of it to bring water inside from the sides, so when there is land who make it impossible, relocate 2 wings on both sides and bring water inside for other rows, just space and move where there is pumps.

What to say about this endevor i took, it was fun play around the limitation of the game, still i think i've made a pretty damn good work of engineering, tell me what you all think about it !

Thanks all
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Re: Tileable Wasteless Nuclear setup (v5)

Post by mrvn »

Building a big reactor always runs into the problem of finding a suitable lake.

So how about some designs that use trains to bring in water? That way you can gather water from anywhere and build the reactor in the middle of a desert.
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Re: Tileable Wasteless Nuclear setup (v5)

Post by MEOWMI »

Gouldukat wrote: ↑Sun Jun 09, 2019 1:34 am Tileable Wasteless Nuclear setup (v6) godlike final iteration :-p

https://pastebin.com/VfQLnLv5
I've had issues getting this to work. Now, I only have 4 reactors in it, but to be honest, that's all you want to begin with.

It keeps filling up the reactors to max (5 cells) when it runs low, when you don't even need 2 cells to max out temps and storage.

There's a lot of logic so it's hard to follow which is natural I suppose, but it also looks like I'll just have to look at it and figure out how to fix it, while waiting for more potential instructions.
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Re: Tileable Wasteless Nuclear setup (v5)

Post by credomane »

MEOWMI wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2020 9:12 am I've had issues getting this to work. Now, I only have 4 reactors in it, but to be honest, that's all you want to begin with.

It keeps filling up the reactors to max (5 cells) when it runs low, when you don't even need 2 cells to max out temps and storage.

There's a lot of logic so it's hard to follow which is natural I suppose, but it also looks like I'll just have to look at it and figure out how to fix it, while waiting for more potential instructions.
I've had issues with this setup as well. First the logic will insert and insert and insert fuel cells until steam is above a certain threshold. Wasting generally 5 uranium cells per reactor every time steam dips under the threshold. Plus the logic doesn't account for the stackable nature of this blueprint. Allowing the fuel cycle to get out of sync with other reactors as the length of the setup grows. Thus wasting some of the neighbor bonus.

I've completely scrapped and re-made the logic. Now each "Reactor Section" as I call them has a some combinators that outputs a few values into the "global" circuit network. These values allow the "Reactor Control Station" to know if there is at least one uranium fuel cell at every reactor and how many reactors are in the system in total. Using this info the system can sync all reactors to the same fuel cycle regardless of when they were built to maximize neighbor bonuses. So far in my testing this has made this logic redesign wasteless. I've kept the separate power networks for now but I might combine them as so far having them separate has been nothing but a pain in the end.

Second issue is the pipe setup for the turbines and steam tanks is sub-optimal. If the system is under high-load half the turbines eventually shut-off because they are starved of steam even though there is plenty in the tanks still. Fluid dynamics from tank to tank is a PITA. Resulting is this strange sine-wave like power graph.

I haven't investigated this yet to fix it but a friend took it upon themselves and claims to have solved this by adding an extra pipeline or two + pump that pull steam from the tanks and push it in from the opposite side of the turbines. I won't have a chance to take a look myself until later tonight.

Third issue is the need to find a landfill-able lake to even use this blueprint in the first place. A monumental task in most games and unless you play seablock you will never be able to stack this book for very long. I plan to see if I can discover some way to rearrange things just enough so that water can be pumped from the outside edges (allowing this BP book to work anywhere!) in but this might not be possible without widening the whole of the "Reactor Sections".

I'll post a BP Book once I get it all worked out. I'm sure there are still errors in the logic. Already fixed a few scenarios that caused all reactors to receive a fuel cell when a new "Reactor Section" was built thus triggering the fault detection which then shut down all reactors. I was missing a check in the "AND" gate for fuel insertion. Perhaps I should follow the trend and post it as a V6 thread?
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Re: Tileable Wasteless Nuclear setup (v5)

Post by MEOWMI »

A slight follow up to my previous post. I removed most of the existing refueling circuitry and basically kept just 2-4 of the existing combinators. I kept the the ones that define how many cores are in the reactor and the few that calculate a threshold value for steam. I then just use this threshold to enable ejection of spent fuel cells, which also pulses refueling. This has generally worked very well but my testing is definitely not thorough.

The steam threshold is quite a high value, but it seems to work fine, with neither insufficient power nor overproduction of steam. I've recently added up to 12 cores, and 8 cores was running fine at close to or even slightly above max wattage. However, at even higher reactor counts, the average power production per core does increase so I am still unsure of whether flow rates will keep up.

(If the steam threshold is correctly designed, I suspect the choice for it may be related to fluid dynamics, as max flow rates may be higher when the storage is mostly full. It is very true that tank-to-tank flow rates are comparatively abysmal without a pump directly between them, but I'm still not sure if the lack of pumps in this build is an issue. Normally for high flow rates you place a pump directly before and directly after a tank and for very high flow rates an additional pump for every few blocks of pipe.)
credomane wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2020 6:49 pm I've had issues with this setup as well. First the logic will insert and insert and insert fuel cells until steam is above a certain threshold. Wasting generally 5 uranium cells per reactor every time steam dips under the threshold. Plus the logic doesn't account for the stackable nature of this blueprint. Allowing the fuel cycle to get out of sync with other reactors as the length of the setup grows. Thus wasting some of the neighbor bonus.
Synchronizing the reactors is definitely essential, and I will admit, I never understood the original logic of this blueprint, but it was definitely not working. In addition to the changes that I describe above, I changed the extracting inserters so only one of them will pulse upon removing spent fuel cells and this signal triggers refueling in the whole reactor array, avoiding problems with synchronization.

As for the need for landfill, I've had preparations to keep several chests worth of landfill in production since early on in anticipation of its need (both for "solar lakes" and projects like this) and while this uses a lot of landfill, it is definitely affordable.
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Re: Tileable Wasteless Nuclear setup (v5)

Post by Bonaducci »

It's been roughly two years since I played Factorio and only now I noticed that this blueprint was not the one I wanted to post here. Here's a latch mechanism that was in the version I wanted to post:

I think I changed some signals to use colors and colored lights but the original blueprint did not have all changes and did not work as intended.
The mechanism was simple. Latch it in yellow state when fuel is put in. When it is taken out, reset it. Steam is separate lock so if there is enough steam at the end of the run it will wait. Cold startup worked just fine, the only drawback is when you add new reactor block while operational. The solution for that is simple as well. Turn on the constant combinator which stops adding the fuel, then add new segment and turn it off when ready to run.
Flow rate is different thing, I did not use that in never vanilla versions. There might be much more sophisticated mechanism to handle that but those reactors should always run in sync and the only case they would run out of sync is when you add new reactor while other are running. It was not worth additional logic. Especially that this was designed as early nuclear version with no logistic networks thus relied only on belts and simple items.
With newer Factorio it might not work. I don't know, I'm running Bob+Angel with high pressure pipes now so everything is different anyways.

It took me just two years to notice that the blueprint was wrong and just because I wanted to reuse it on my new map :D
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