Support - Uranium Power

[Fatmice]

Hello,

The 0.7% production is sufficient for two diagonal chains, so either use my double diagonal in the example build, or try the single diagonal from my video. I'm fairly certain neither of those builds will get stuck since I force the 0.7% as the rate limiter.

[FiFtHeLeMeNt]

@Fatmice
First thanks for this great mod.
I would like to report a bug in v6.2, I noticed my 72MW reactor has 2.6K of pressurized water while my 144MW reactor has something like 350 pressurized water. I dont know what has been their intended capacity but seems you missed one 0 or added an extra one to the other.
Also have you found a way to deplete the uranium ? currently this mod is like power god mod, after you make power rods, you can use them forever which we know is not true in reality.
I am not a Lua expert, but cant you make the reactors like normal burners so they use power rods ? it is still better than having the rods forever. or making the reactors like assembly machines which you can place the rods inside and they turn them into depleted uranium after they are used. something like that. currently this mod is overpowered.

[Fatmice]

@Fatmice
First thanks for this great mod.
I would like to report a bug in v6.2, I noticed my 72MW reactor has 2.6K of pressurized water while my 144MW reactor has something like 350 pressurized water. I dont know what has been their intended capacity but seems you missed one 0 or added an extra one to the other.

You are right. Oops! For 0.6.0 I was working mainly with the 72 MW reactor and did not update the base_area of 144 MW reactor. I will give it some love for the 0.6.3 release.

Also have you found a way to deplete the uranium ? currently this mod is like power god mod, after you make power rods, you can use them forever which we know is not true in reality.
I am not a Lua expert, but cant you make the reactors like normal burners so they use power rods ? it is still better than having the rods forever. or making the reactors like assembly machines which you can place the rods inside and they turn them into depleted uranium after they are used. something like that. currently this mod is overpowered.

Fuel decay will come. I hope by then you won't cry that it is overpowered

I have already implemented fuel decay in one of my dev build. The reason I have not released this feature yet is because I have not finished all of the fuel breeding work. It is unfair to destroy the fuel without a way for the player to generate more fuel. The Uraninite deposits are some what rare so you will feel an immediate pain if you are not able to "stretch" out the lifetime of your supplies.

The reactor is a boiler, but you can not put fuel into it because it has a 0 fuel inventory size. It is also not very satisfying to make the fuel rod into a burnable fuel since then you can feed a normal boiler with it. The sight of burning one of my 4.7% fuel assembly in a vanilla boiler is irksome.

As I've said elsewhere, 0.6.x is mainly about completing the heat and liquid cycles. This is foundational work and is very needed. That and it is slow because of new assets creation. I'm not Yuoki

[FiFtHeLeMeNt]

Thank you for your reply, cant wait for new version. this mod is awesome.

[tomcat]

Is it intended that a 72mwt reactor can power a 30mw turbine at 20-24mw constant output using the steam system with only 3 x 4.7% fuel assemblies? its been running like this for well over an hour without any drop in the superheated steam production

edit: it will also run quite happily at 100% output (30mw) using only 4x 4.7% assemblies

[FiFtHeLeMeNt]

Is it intended that a MK1 steam generator can only feed one 30MW turbine ? I tried to connect to two and it runs out of steam. if this is the case feeding the turbines with pressured water makes more sense. also I found out you can not place reactor setups with construction bots and blueprints, it wont work.

[Fatmice]

Is it intended that a MK1 steam generator can only feed one 30MW turbine ? I tried to connect to two and it runs out of steam. if this is the case feeding the turbines with pressured water makes more sense. also I found out you can not place reactor setups with construction bots and blueprints, it wont work.

Yes, 1:1 ratio. Reactors and support buildings cannot be blueprinted and will remain that way for the time being. Part of the reason for making you build them manually is to make it less appealing to just slap them down as a blueprint and forget about them. A running theme in this mod is that if a build is insufficient, you tear it down and replace it with something even better. Of course, larger versions of the reactor is not in the mod yet, which I intend to have, due to graphics not being there yet. Besides the two reactors currently available, three more is planned, 288 MW, 576 MW, and big birtha 1152 MW. I don't foresee most players needing more than a few reactors. If you need more than a "few" of the last type, then it is time to upgrade to fusion power, which I also intend to implement , quality not quantity This does not preclude them from being part of a blueprint of course.

Why would feeding a turbine with pressurized water makes more sense? Do you feed turbines pressurized water in real-systems and expect that to work? To be fair, you can already feed pressurized water to the vanilla steam-generators, so do that if you fancy

Btw, you can run two 30 MWs, you just need to think about it.

Is it intended that a 72mwt reactor can power a 30mw turbine at 20-24mw constant output using the steam system with only 3 x 4.7% fuel assemblies? its been running like this for well over an hour without any drop in the superheated steam production

edit: it will also run quite happily at 100% output (30mw) using only 4x 4.7% assemblies

Yes, intended. Each reactor has a power factor that will compensate for the fuel's drop in potential energy as they are "burned" up. This was done to simulate breeding coefficient without all of the extra code. Of course this makes sense only in context of fuel decaying, which is a feature I've yet to released. For now, this simply means you can get a running power supply sooner and with less fuel assemblies. Don't expect that to happen when the fuel starts to decay.

[FiFtHeLeMeNt]

Why would feeding a turbine with pressurized water makes more sense?

I meant in context of power generation efficiency, because in youtube tutorial video you mentioned feeding turbines with pressurized water is wasteful as making them is power intensive. before I use the new machines, I was feeding the pressurized water directly and I was generating about 200MW using only two reactors (one 72 and one 144) may be 5% to 10% of that would be wasted in water pressurizers, but after I switched to new setup I noticed I have to make 7 72MW reactors to gain the same amount of power. I agree with you that new setup makes more sense in terms of being realistic.

[Fatmice]

You need to figure out how to run 2 turbines on one 72 MW reactor. When you do, you will best your previous setup with only four 72 MW reactors.

0.6.3 will have Mk II steam generator for use with the 144 MW reactor, which will allow 2x30 MW turbines to run. And since whatever works on 72 MW reactor will work on the 144 MW reactor, you will really be cooking with steam.

[FiFtHeLeMeNt]

Already done sir : http://i.imgur.com/mUG8V84.png

[Fatmice]

So why do you still complain?

[FiFtHeLeMeNt]

I did it after you mentioned it is possible. but my goal was not complaining, I wanted to contribute to this mod

[Fatmice]

Already done sir : http://i.imgur.com/mUG8V84.png

I forgot to point out that you might want to reverse and reflect the turbines if you want to recycle the water that is making steam. The large tank that is the cooling tower reservoir should also have water connected to it to condensed low pressure steam.

[FiFtHeLeMeNt]

Already done sir : http://i.imgur.com/mUG8V84.png

I forgot to point out that you might want to reverse and reflect the turbines if you want to recycle the water that is making steam. The large tank that is the cooling tower reservoir should also have water connected to it to condensed low pressure steam.

I tried the setup as you explained, but I noticed the large tank uses a lot of water ( as you mentioned in youtube video ) so I tried to connect the water to steam generator directly and found out it works perfectly and doesnt use as much water so may be it is another bug and it is not supposed to work this way, you may want to look into it.

[Fatmice]

I tried the setup as you explained, but I noticed the large tank uses a lot of water ( as you mentioned in youtube video ) so I tried to connect the water to steam generator directly and found out it works perfectly and doesnt use as much water so may be it is another bug and it is not supposed to work this way, you may want to look into it.

No what you're doing is exploiting an unfinished mechanism. At the moment, heat is completely rejected to the environment so that is why the cooling tower uses much water. What's going on is that the low pressure steam is transferring all of its residual heat to the cooling water to condense back to 15 degree water in the secondary loop. This is a lot of heat and is capable of boiling the cooling water, hence the steam that you see coming out of cooling tower. Since there isn't water in your cooling tower reservoir, your low pressure steam collector will be full. The excess is currently being kept in an internal variable. In the next version, if this variable is larger than 0, your turbine will cease to work due to back-pressure. In fact, the turbine will start to slow down in proportion to how full the low pressure steam collector is. The next version has four new mechanisms to lower the consumption of cooling water.

1/ Heat recovery between low pressure steam and secondary water loop. Low pressure steam will leave the collector and enter a heat exchanger to dump heat to the secondary water that is the condensed form of the low pressure steam. The heat transfer is efficient only when the entering water is 15 degrees and should be enough to bring this water close to boiling, > 80 degrees.
2/ Low pressure steam will then enter the condenser to transfer the remaining heat to cooling water to condense back to 15 degree water.
3/ Cooling water will then enter the cooling tower. There will be two types of cooling tower that you can choose from, a dry type, and a wet type. In both types, you will need to put in what is called filling material. The amount of this filler to use is for you to figure out and add or subtract as needed. The dry type uses no external water to cool the cooling water and cools by radiating heat to the air in the cooling tower so it is very sensitive to the amount of fillers. This simply means that the dry cooling tower acts as a heat sink with a power rating defined by the amount of fillers. Effectively, you will need to use more than one dry towers to service a turbine. The wet cooling tower uses an external water source to wet the filler material and thus can dissipate much more heat to the air for the same number of fillers. What this means to you is that the wet cooling tower is a heat sink with very large power rating. Effectively, one tower should be able to service a few turbines.
4/ In the case of wet cooling tower, the external water, having absorbed some heat from the cooling water, is collected and sent to a cooling pond. The cooling pond is a massive reservoir. In addition, it will shed its heat by evaporating some water proportional to the cooling pond's surface area and the change in temperature. For example, temperature raised by 1 degree, water evaporated is (1/85)*cooling pond surface area. So for that number to be small, change in temperature must be small, which is determined solely by volume of water in the cooling pond.

[Irunfold]

Hello Fatmice,

First, thank you for this mod, it is quite a nice one! I love the uranium depleted bullets as my gun turrets finally recover some usefulness !
Now, my problem: I am currently trying to setup a layout for the 144MW reactor, barely identical to your example map. But I don't seem to be able to select the "Pressurized water-heat to water-heat exchange" in the Big Heat Exchanger (S or R) which is required to transfer heat between the inner and the outer loop. This recipe is locked in red color, but I don't know why as I have brought the two pipes in question(the cold unpressurized water from the lake and the hot pressurized water from the reactor), facing each other, to the big exchangers.The inner loop has room for more pressurized water(I filled it up to the half) and the 144MW reactor is indeed outputting pressurized water heated to 350°C.
So what?

[Fatmice]

Hi, the answer is very simple. I made a boo boo and I was hoping against hope that nobody will notice. Much good that did... However, the fix would require me to release another minor version and I'd rather not since my development build is a bit of a mess right now. So in the interim, you will have to do some file replacement and some command.

Replace the mod's technology.lua with this

technology.lua

(5.17 KiB) Downloaded 226 times

At console type each of these.

Code: Select all

/c game.local_player.force.recipes["heat-exchange-water-water-02"].enabled = true
/c game.local_player.force.recipes["heat-exchange-pressurised-water-water-02"].enabled = true
/c game.local_player.force.recipes["heat-exchange-pressurised-water-pressurised-water-02"].enabled = true

That should do it.

Some comments from looking at your save:
1/ The heat exchangers do not need fuel. Ignore all heat exchangers fuel need. They will take the energy they need from the hot liquids.
2/ You need more pressurized water in the inner loop. I added more until there was about 200 units in the reactor when all heat exchangers are working.

[Irunfold]

Ok! I am at the office right now so, I will try the solution when back to home but I thank you very much for that fast answer!
1/ About the fuel, I indeed realized it wasn't required in solid form and also thought it was actually using the heated water as fuel but I haven't taken the time to remove the belts.
2/ Ok, I take note of this. I once modified the pipe arrangement to insert a tank of pressurized water for the reactor input (but I suppose that the save file I have attached wasn't the most recent) without results of course. Now, with your fix, I hope this tank will help

Great mod by the way, so keep up with the good work! All the best.

[Fatmice]

The heat exchangers don't consume the heated water, only some heat from the hot side. Your inner loop will never need replenishment. Becareful with the amount of liquid flowing in the inner loop. You want sufficient amount to get good heat carrying capacity while not too much so as to prevent the inner loop liquid from emptying out of the heat exchangers...They are "products" of the heat exchangers and if they don't quickly vacate the out going fluid boxes then you will have handicapped the heat exchangers productivity.

[Irunfold]

I understood your sentence " They will take the energy they need from the hot liquids." correctly. I simply failed at using the right terms(heated water =/= heat from water). However, Yes, thanks for the detailed explanation.