Extensible 5,494.08 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

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Re: Tileable 5.6 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by vangrunz »

mrvn wrote: Sun Apr 02, 2023 2:59 pmI didn't say to add more heat exchangers. The top and bottom row should keep the same number of heat exchangers as they currently have. But
The position of the offshore pump in the long and short rows differs. I said to move the offshore pump in the short row to where it is in the long row. That way, when you expand the reactor there will still be water where the new pump needs to go. In fact the old pump will already be there so even if you landfilled under the pump things still work.

And when the pump is moved you have to connect the heat exchangers to it somehow. You could use an underground pipe, but then you would have to remove that on expansion. Instead I suggested to move the heat exchangers (the half of the short row that gets fed by the outer offshore pump). Again that places the heat exchangers where there would be heat exhcnagers in the expanded reactor so nothing needs to be removed on expansion.
Unfortunately, at least one offshore pump needs to be removed before it can expanded. Since there're 12 heat exchangers and 1 offshore pump can only handle 11 at full load, it will look like this:

2023-04-03_193406.png
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Same with the turbines. The long row should just have more turbines on the outside, nothing to remove before expanding the reactor.
Since the amount of turbines match the power of each reactor and they need to be connected to the collecting pipeline, I don't see any solution for this.
When you have to remove the top and bottom rows that's a drop of 4 * 20 MW == 80 MW of power.
4*120 MW in contrast to 4*160 MW, yes.
And that probably comes at a time when you have brownouts already. Because who notices power running out before it actually does?
You could set up one accumulator additionally to the reactor's power grid. It will be completely unloaded if there's an overconsumption. Combined with an alarm, that's a sure indication that your power production doesn't match overall consumption (Edith):

2023-04-03_201315.png
2023-04-03_201315.png (3.02 MiB) Viewed 3644 times
You can make your reactor setup totally tileable by the simple solution of moving a few heat exchangers around and adding a few pumps. I think that's totally worth it.
That's another idea of mine:
While all 36 reactors can handle 962 steam turbines without problems, I "just" could set up each row of reactors with the identical amount of heat exchangers as well as steam turbines. But: 962 / 36 = 26,72...so, OK, every row could have 2x 26 turbines, for which 2x15 heat exchangers are necessary, assuming that the reactors share the heat with each other without problems. On the other hand, by reducing or expanding reactor's amount, the total amount of steam turbines/heat exchangers change due to the fact the more nuclear reactors have a 160 MW output due to their neighbour bonus, the 4*120 MW stays always the same, changing the ratio. The more reactors, the more heat exchangers/steam turbines are necessary, and vice versa you need less if you have eg. only 3 rows (4*120+2*160 MW).

This leads to the conclusion that a truly stackable nuclear power plant setup isn't possible without technical weaknesses.
As for longer heat pipes: There is enough wiggle room in the heat flow for longer heat pipes. You are not loosing any energy by adding a few more, the heat still spreads all the way to the outside and all heat exchangers will run as expected.
I see. I could lengthen them, to add roboports or anything else. That's another thought I had, indeed.
Fuel control doesn't try to read the electrical energy load, it's trying to read the reactor temperature. By monitoring steam levels you detect when the reactors temperature falls so low that some heat exchangers drop below 500°C. And the steam tanks you use for monitoring also create enough buffer to bring the reactor temperatur back to fully working levels.
Like stated above, I'd need a second tank for fuel throtteling. And, like you said, it's a "try" to "read" reactor temperature. In fact, that's not possible, so every workaround will either produce too much or too less heat, while "too less" is not intended. You can indeed throttle fuel consumption, but this will not prevent overproduction of heat and therewith steam that can be tapped off -- voilà, here we are.
There are a number of posts in the forum for truly tileable reactors. And I just told you how to make yours one too, twice now.
Yes, I got that already from Tertius. But my intention is, at its best, a tileable setup which is accorded to nuclear's heat production. Since we have neighbour bonus, this isn't just possible in that way.
Lets try a third way:

Start by making the short rows as long rows. I know, I know. Now you have too many heat exchangers and steam turbines. So remove some of them without breaking the reactor or having to add any new pipes. You can remove any entity from the short row without breaking the tileability. Just don't add any.
See above, 15 HE's with 26 ST would do this job fine if heat distribution works well between each reactor.

I thank you for your patience to explain. I've learned alot around the concept of nuclear power production.
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Re: Extensible 5,494.08 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by mmmPI »

vangrunz wrote: Mon Apr 03, 2023 5:11 pm Another thing:
Fuel control must be 100% accurate not to produce additional steam. I do not know of any setup currently that can prodive this, an adaptive steam level monitoring & adjusting is obligatory. Currently, the inserter can have only one signal set. It would be interesting if anyone had found out how to manage this with eg. accumulators, steam tanks and/or constant/arithmetic/decider combinators? Ideas welcome: it's no problem to add a second tank in each line for fuel throtteling (one dedicated is always necessary to guarantee 100% turbine load while steam is consumed otherwise).

On the other hand, a constant consumption by a nuclear reactor is a vanilla setup, that can be altered, though -- in contrast to boilers in combination with steam generators which will consume more fuel the higher the load is. I think this is due how nuclear power is managed in real life; a fuel rod isn't aware of any load, but steam engines do, like every other combustion engine.
That's an important point for nuclear plants imo !

It is possible to make fuel control so that you don't waste heat (even though as you said uranium cells are cheap) if you really want to be super efficient, it is possible to math how much steam a fuel cell represent, since a fuel cell is 8GJ without adjacency bonus. If you were to use 2 reactor there would be 1 adjacency bonus , so feeding a dual core with fuel cell gives them an effective value of 16 GJ per fuel cell. And if you use a quad-core or more, then with 2 adjacency bonus it is possible to count 24 GJ per cell, up to 32GJ per fuel cell for those inserted in the reactors that have 3 fed neighbour.

This is one method (amongst others) to do it, you can math out how much steam this represent using those values : https://wiki.factorio.com/Steam
A storage tank holding 25000 units of Steam at 500°C thus contains 2.425 gigajoules of energy, a surprisingly large amount equal to 485 fully charged accumulators!

(200 Joule / unit / Celsius) * 25000 units * (500°C-15°C) = 2 425 000 000 joules = 2.425 GJ
Now with those it is possible to "count" how many steam tank you need to buffer all the steam from 1 refuel. This way you can throttle refuel to be active only when there is enough room to store all the steam which will prevent waste of heat when reactor reaches 1000°C, because it will not reach 1000°C because the heat will always be transformed into steam or else the reactor is not given fuel ( when steam is somewhat full already).

Say you use a 2x2 grid so each reactor has 2 neighbour. Each cell then counts for 3 cells (1+2), so 24 GJ (8*3). For a total of 96 GJ (24*4) of energy that will be made into hot steam for 1 refuel.
Given 1 tank is 2.425 GJ worth of storage when filled up with 500°C steam. It is therefore possible to buffer all steam for 1 refuel with 40 storage tanks (96/2.425). ( or really 39.587628866). Or given that 1 tank filled with 500°C steam is worth as much as 485 fully charged accumulators, 19200 accumulators would be necessary to store all the energy contained in 4 fuel cell.

There are different ways to implement that one method of measuring the steam buffer, you can monitor the quantity of steam in all tanks, or given your setup, if you expect all tanks to have the same quantity of steam, you can just monitor 1. This allow for automatic refuel timer depending on energy consumption using previous datas to make sure the amount of steam storage is enough to buffer 1 cycle of uranium worth of steam to make sure it can prevent heat loss .

If you plan to never use 0% of the power plant, you don't need to store 100% of steam, there are some trade-off here if you use always 50% or more from the nuclear power plant, it reduces by half the amount of steam tank required to buffer all the steam. But you may loose some energy if suddenly the electric consumption stops, just after a refuel which will burn fully but there would be no room to store the steam.

There are some more technicalities with wires to make the previously described logic operationnal. A whole new puzzle :D, because of what can happen if not all inserter insert fuel at the same time, do you try to prevent the situation ? doesn't that risk causing a power shortage ? There are plenty of some designs choices here :) One of my favourite is to remove the used fuel cell from the reactor only when the steam is low using 1 wire color, and 1 condition. And connect the other inserter with stack size 1, to feed fuel only when it sees the used fuel being removed using the other wire color and the "read hand content" setting on the extracting inserter to transmit to the refueler inserter the moment of action. This mean i totally risk power shortage if i don't have fuel cell ready at the good time of the extraction of previous used fuel. And so i use a speaker to tell me if my fuel reserve is low to avoid previously mentionned problem. Also i need to give the first fuel cell manually. Both are things i know some people dislike.

It is one of the listed disadvantages "no control about consumption", i think you have done already a lot of the research for attempting to solving it maybe unkowingly, since you are pre-occupied with the level of fluid inside turbines, and you also looked at level in tanks carefully from what i read on another thread, i think it's just the extra step to make use of those observations to save on fuel :D It may also gives incentives to make room for roboports in some ways, to make it easier to guarantee the availability of fuel and would make it easier to extend the blueprint. Which is another listed disadvantages that maybe you want to remove if you spend more time on this blueprint :)
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Re: Extensible 5,494.08 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by vangrunz »

Two things to mention:
  • There's no possibility to remove loaded uranium fuel cells from a reactor. I've just tried this even with a stack filter inserter filtered with such cells. Inserters of any kind do only pull out used up cells. So, only manual removing is possible at this time.
  • Monitoring steam tank load must also stack with the total power of the power plant, which means this has to be adaptive unless we have a 1:1 ratio. Since we cannot read anything out of nuclear reactors this is doomed to fail. The more reactors, the more neighbour bonus we have and thus the more steam can be produced with a single nuclear fuel cell, leaving less nuclear fuel necessary.
And, of course you're right regarding electric energy consumption that fluctuates, at least at day/night cycle if there're (a mass of) lamps in the base, not to say about additional solar cells/accumulators simultaneously.

The only solution I see is to let oneself warn with depleted/unloading accumulators, however, a speaker doesn't work if there's only 1 accumulator and the energy drain is too fast: there's no possibility to notice that, unless there're enough accumulators in ratio to power drain.

I would love to see how to use carefully the consumption of fuel cells, that would be great. I could combine that with 100% steam load everywhere... ;)

Since I am a fan of belts rather than logistic robots and I don't see that produced, but available, fuel cells represent a waste, it would be, of course, possible to add enough roboports to cover at least the nuclear reactors. That would be an extra length of 4 each, which should suit a temperature for the last heat exchanger > 500° at least. I could try such a setup in my spare time and post again.
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Re: Extensible 5,494.08 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by vangrunz »

Another thought:

A buffering cluster of accumulators between the nuclear power plant & the base that is monitored to calculate the fuel cells needed.

This could a) compensate a fluctuating energy consumption and b) monitor the effective energy consumption. Since accumulators have the same unit (Joule) we can convert the amount of cells needed in comparison to a fuel cell (5 MJ & 8 GJ). Accumulators will be charged if their level is too low and do discharge if it's above a certain one (Schmitt-Trigger). The high spot would be to find out how much accumulators are necessary and where are the trigger levels.
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Re: Extensible 5,494.08 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by mmmPI »

vangrunz wrote: Mon Apr 03, 2023 7:19 pm Two things to mention:
  • There's no possibility to remove loaded uranium fuel cells from a reactor. I've just tried this even with a stack filter inserter filtered with such cells. Inserters of any kind do only pull out used up cells. So, only manual removing is possible at this time.
  • Monitoring steam tank load must also stack with the total power of the power plant, which means this has to be adaptive unless we have a 1:1 ratio. Since we cannot read anything out of nuclear reactors this is doomed to fail. The more reactors, the more neighbour bonus we have and thus the more steam can be produced with a single nuclear fuel cell, leaving less nuclear fuel necessary.
And, of course you're right regarding electric energy consumption that fluctuates, at least at day/night cycle if there're (a mass of) lamps in the base, not to say about additional solar cells/accumulators simultaneously.

The only solution I see is to let oneself warn with depleted/unloading accumulators, however, a speaker doesn't work if there's only 1 accumulator and the energy drain is too fast: there's no possibility to notice that, unless there're enough accumulators in ratio to power drain.

I would love to see how to use carefully the consumption of fuel cells, that would be great. I could combine that with 100% steam load everywhere... ;)
The first point of the list maybe comes from my explanation being not precise. I do not remove loaded uranium, always used cell. I always insert only 1 fuel per reactor, never more than 1, then the system wait until the uranium is burned, and become a used cell. Then it check another condition, is the steam storage low ? if the steam is not low, the used cell stays in the reactor core. Only when the steam storage is under the calculated threshold, is the used fuel cell removed from reactor. When this occur, the new fuel is also inserted.

It is possible that during a long time there is a used cell waiting in all reactors, it is removed only when it is necessary to refuel. ( when steam is getting low). This throttle fuel input when energy consumption is low and steam can accumulate in storage tanks.

It is possible to math out precisely how many tanks you need if you have a longer reactor than 2x2.

If you have 4x2, then you have 4 reactor at 120 MW, and 4 reactor at 160MW. That means if you give them 1 fuel cell each, that is 8 fuel cell. 4 consumed in reactor with 3x40MW and 4 cell consumed in reactor with 4x40MW. So this would mean 4x3x8 + 4x4x8 GJ total. 224GJ about a 100 storage tanks.

I agree with you that the storage space scale with the size of the power plant, but i disagree it is doomed to fail. It is possible to make such adaptive system, there are example on this forum in energy creations.

When you count the total power of the reactor you count 40 80 120 or 160 MW depending on adjacency, that's the same for GJ per fuel cell 8 16 24 32 GJ depending on the adjacency of the reactor that burn it.

If you can put in storage the amount of steam produced by 8 fuel cell. ( 64GJ without adjacency, 224GJ with adjacency). It then become easier to trigger refuel.

Say you have 100 storage tanks, and you want a security margin of 10 tanks. You can store 25000*100 +25000*10 steam. This is 2 750 000 steam.
You can trigger refuel when steam is under 250 000.

If you consume 0 electricity, after 200 second, the storage tanks will be filled with steam. But there will be no loss. The new fuel will not be burn until the steam is consumed by turbines, if you have low consumption of electricity, then the steam buffer will slowly deplete, if energy consumption is big, then steam buffer will deplete fast.

Whenever steam is under 250 000, this means there is enough room for 8 fuel cells, so it is time to put fuel again.

If you want to have a tileable design, then i think it is fair to consider all reactors are going to have 32 GJ per fuel cell, ( 160 MW for all ) this is a little overkill for the 2 pair of reactors on the sides that would require less storage tanks to be more precise, but it guarantees that the minimum amount is present, ( and there are little extra storage space).

Maybe one thing that is problematic is that in order to do what i described previously, steam need to be able to flow IN and OUT of the same storage tanks which cannot happen if pumps act as valve at their entrance. Previous system require storage tank for steam to fill up "fast" when fuel is being burned, and then slowly "empty" as electricity is needed. I'm not sure how you can combine this with your use of pumps that "force" the flow of steam.
If you were to add storage tanks at the end of the line it wouldn't work because steam would be trapped there and couldn't flow back.

And yes this whole storage thing could be avoided if it was possible to remove the fuel and put it back when needed, but as you said the game doesn't allow that nor reading anything on the reactor, and that's why the methods to spare fuel are "indirect" measures, "once a fuel is inserted it's going to be fully burn" Hence it is necessary to store (all) that energy under the form of hot steam or else it vanishes due to reactor reaching 1000°C +.
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Re: Extensible 5,494.08 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by mmmPI »

vangrunz wrote: Mon Apr 03, 2023 8:09 pm Another thought:

A buffering cluster of accumulators between the nuclear power plant & the base that is monitored to calculate the fuel cells needed.

This could a) compensate a fluctuating energy consumption and b) monitor the effective energy consumption. Since accumulators have the same unit (Joule) we can convert the amount of cells needed in comparison to a fuel cell (5 MJ & 8 GJ). Accumulators will be charged if their level is too low and do discharge if it's above a certain one (Schmitt-Trigger). The high spot would be to find out how much accumulators are necessary and where are the trigger levels.

Yes that would work too given that 1 steam tank full of 500°C steam is storing the same amount of energy as 485 accumulators most people use steam tanks to store the energy because it's more space efficient. But for UPS concern, i guess accumulator storage are the best :)
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Re: Tileable 5.6 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by mrvn »

vangrunz wrote: Mon Apr 03, 2023 6:02 pm Unfortunately, at least one offshore pump needs to be removed before it can expanded. Since there're 12 heat exchangers and 1 offshore pump can only handle 11 at full load, it will look like this:

2023-04-03_193406.png
Now you moved too much. Don't move the inner offshore pump. Only move half the heat exchangers. It's perfectly fine to have 2 groups of heat exchangers. Half gets the water from the outside pump and the other half from the inside pump. When you extend the reactor you fill in the gap.
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Re: Tileable 5.6 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by mrvn »

vangrunz wrote: Mon Apr 03, 2023 6:02 pm
When you have to remove the top and bottom rows that's a drop of 4 * 20 MW == 80 MW of power.
4*120 MW in contrast to 4*160 MW, yes.
Actually it's even more and also less. While the top and bottom row only have 2 neighbour bonuses for the reactors you also reduce the neighbour bonus of the next row. They now are top/bottom rows temporarily. So it's actually like you removed middle reactors power wise. But you would normally only remove stuff on one end of the reactor and extend in that direction.

So a power reduction of 2 full 4x40MW reactors = 320MW. I would claim that is noticable.
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Re: Extensible 5,494.08 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by mrvn »

vangrunz wrote: Mon Apr 03, 2023 6:02 pm That's another idea of mine:
While all 36 reactors can handle 962 steam turbines without problems, I "just" could set up each row of reactors with the identical amount of heat exchangers as well as steam turbines. But: 962 / 36 = 26,72...so, OK, every row could have 2x 26 turbines, for which 2x15 heat exchangers are necessary, assuming that the reactors share the heat with each other without problems. On the other hand, by reducing or expanding reactor's amount, the total amount of steam turbines/heat exchangers change due to the fact the more nuclear reactors have a 160 MW output due to their neighbour bonus, the 4*120 MW stays always the same, changing the ratio. The more reactors, the more heat exchangers/steam turbines are necessary, and vice versa you need less if you have eg. only 3 rows (4*120+2*160 MW).

This leads to the conclusion that a truly stackable nuclear power plant setup isn't possible without technical weaknesses.
Reactors are indeed very good heat pipes, although a bit on the expensive side.

If you are shooting for a fixed size reactor the placing the same number of heat exchangers and turbines at every reactor is perfectly fine. The top/bottom reactors will just leach a little bit of heat from the other reactors.

As a rule of thumb: If you are using only the reactor for power then round down so you produce more heat and more steam than you can consume. That way the reactor will not flicker between max and sustainable power. If you you are using the reactor with e.g. solar then round up and add some extra steam tanks. The slight over consumption during night will be balanced by under consumption during daytime.

If you are using lots of solar (enough to sustain your base during daytime) then the calculations totally changes as well. You only need power for 1/3rd of the time but you produce heat (and steam) 100% of the time. So you can drive 3 times as many steam turbines with the right amount of steam tanks.

There is no one perfect reactor design. It always depends on the use case. And no, you can make a totally tileable reactor that has (as close as possible) the right ratio of reactors, heat exchanges and turbines at all times.
vangrunz wrote: Mon Apr 03, 2023 6:02 pm
Fuel control doesn't try to read the electrical energy load, it's trying to read the reactor temperature. By monitoring steam levels you detect when the reactors temperature falls so low that some heat exchangers drop below 500°C. And the steam tanks you use for monitoring also create enough buffer to bring the reactor temperatur back to fully working levels.
Like stated above, I'd need a second tank for fuel throtteling. And, like you said, it's a "try" to "read" reactor temperature. In fact, that's not possible, so every workaround will either produce too much or too less heat, while "too less" is not intended. You can indeed throttle fuel consumption, but this will not prevent overproduction of heat and therewith steam that can be tapped off -- voilà, here we are.
Since you don't need the first tank you can just repurpose them for that task. And while measuring the steam level will produce too much heat it will only be for 200 seconds if you do it right. And you have both the steam tanks and the heat pipes there to capture that extra heat and store it till it is needed. What you see when you have fuel control is the reactor cooling down to 600-700°C without fuel. Then some fuel gets thrown in and it rises to 700-900°C before the fuel is consumed or something like it. Even if you cut the power all the energy of a single fuel cell per reactor can easily be stored without overheating the reactor.

But, as you said, you don't care about fuel usage. So this isn't an issue to worry about.
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Re: Tileable 5.6 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by FuryoftheStars »

vangrunz wrote: Mon Apr 03, 2023 5:11 pm Just adding the turbines will let the steam level stay < 200. That's a fact.
Sure. The last one will fill up to 100 and then anything over that will overflow into the pipes. Why is that an issue? They're still functioning at maximum power generation and still using the same UPS as if they were filled max at 200. Except, you're less almost a thousand UPS consuming entities. Heck, you could get rid of the storage tanks between the heat exchangers and turbines + 1 pump (unless you want to try the self regulating, no fuel wasting setup). Now you have gotten rid of 1000 UPS consuming entities plus another 150-200 for the various indicator lamps that are now useless on this. Considering you were concerned about UPS usage and savings by filling all fluid containing entities to max earlier, I'd think this would be something that you'd want (UPS savings).
vangrunz wrote: Mon Apr 03, 2023 5:11 pm Indeed, it is. I often asked myself: where to get the steam for coal liquefaction or modded recipes, without setting up extra steam engines which consume additional fuel?
Erm, by reusing your early steam generators? From before nuclear? :? In fact, you're wasting even more fuel and energy by using the 500°C steam, because that requires more energy to get it to temp than the 165°C steam.
vangrunz wrote: Mon Apr 03, 2023 5:11 pm They cannot rob: if they do, the tanks will start to fall under maximum and the pump will immediately stop until the tank is full again. This guarantees that the turbines never run out of steam (see the red copper lines which are individual for each half of the row).
I wasn't referring to your current setup with that statement. What I meant was, by moving the pump away from the turbine (so it's not directly connected), you don't need the circuit control to it anymore. Instead, it can only take steam that overflows from the last turbine into the pipes between the turbine and the pump. This is meant to be done in combination with removing the pumps between the turbines and all the other unneeded circuitry. But, of course, this assumes you can let go of the incessant need to have everything at max capacity.
vangrunz wrote: Mon Apr 03, 2023 5:11 pm Fuel control must be 100% accurate not to produce additional steam. I do not know of any setup currently that can prodive this, an adaptive steam level monitoring & adjusting is obligatory.
I'm pretty sure you'll find a lot of such setups right here in this energy subsection of the forums, and I believe some people have already provided links to you a couple of times to such setups.
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Re: Tileable 5.6 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by vangrunz »

mrvn wrote: Mon Apr 03, 2023 8:56 pmIf you are shooting for a fixed size reactor the placing the same number of heat exchangers and turbines at every reactor is perfectly fine.
Any unfueled reactor must not act as a Heat Pipe.
The top/bottom reactors will just leach a little bit of heat from the other reactors.
Where to read?
As a rule of thumb: If you are using only the reactor for power then round down so you produce more heat and more steam than you can consume.
Exactly that's what my setup does, including steam production.
If you are using lots of solar (enough to sustain your base during daytime) then the calculations totally changes as well.
I don't.
There is no one perfect reactor design.
Thank you.

The only perfect thing is death. Everything else mentioned to be "perfect" is just perfectly wrong.
FuryoftheStars wrote: Tue Apr 04, 2023 2:35 amI'm pretty sure you'll find a lot of such setups right here in this energy subsection of the forums, and I believe some people have already provided links to you a couple of times to such setups.
While respecting neighbourhood bonus? No.

Give them all a fixed value (no matter of any neighbours), and it would even more fit into real life than this setup. A fuel rod doesn't produce more power if there're others adjacent. The total amount of energy stays the same.
Sure. The last one will fill up to 100 and then anything over that will overflow into the pipes.
Pipes do not have an unlimited capacity, so no, not "anything over that will overflow into the pipes" can be used. You need pumps for that. See the 100% scaleable setup without any pumps; you will see two pipelines instead.
Now you have gotten rid of 1000 UPS consuming entities plus another 150-200 for the various indicator lamps that are now useless on this.
What's "useless" or not, is always depending on the player.

Optimizing UPS is a task for developers. A Player who has to worry about such internal things wouldn't be able to play this for long.
In fact, you're wasting even more fuel and energy by using the 500°C steam, because that requires more energy to get it to temp than the 165°C steam.
If you can use 500° steam at exactly the same value with 165° steam, then there's something wrong in overall gameplay mechanics.

Of course, Steam Turbines respect this ratio, and a Steam Engine don't care how hot the Steam is (that might be wrong, but O.K.), but an Oil Refinery can do with Coal Liquefaction.
This is meant to be done in combination with removing the pumps between the turbines and all the other unneeded circuitry. But, of course, this assumes you can let go of the incessant need to have everything at max capacity.
You are not authorized to tell other people how to play this game.
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Re: Tileable 5.6 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by mrvn »

vangrunz wrote: Wed Apr 26, 2023 9:31 am
Sure. The last one will fill up to 100 and then anything over that will overflow into the pipes.
Pipes do not have an unlimited capacity, so no, not "anything over that will overflow into the pipes" can be used. You need pumps for that. See the 100% scaleable setup without any pumps; you will see two pipelines instead.
I thought the idea was to use any left over steam for coal liquefaction. So you aren't looking to use all the steam the heat exchangers produce with 0 steam going to the steam turbines. The part of the steam that is left over should easily fit into the pipe. And after the pipe you can put a pump. The idea is to use the pipe as a natural overflow valve instead of sucking out all the steam out of the steam turbines with a pump before they can use it to create energy.

And if you really need more steam than naturally overflows in one row of turbines then grab the overflow from every row and combine them all.

It's still wastefull (because see below) but you might prefer to waste nuclear fuel over using coal to produce low temp steam.
vangrunz wrote: Wed Apr 26, 2023 9:31 am
In fact, you're wasting even more fuel and energy by using the 500°C steam, because that requires more energy to get it to temp than the 165°C steam.
If you can use 500° steam at exactly the same value with 165° steam, then there's something wrong in overall gameplay mechanics.

Of course, Steam Turbines respect this ratio, and a Steam Engine don't care how hot the Steam is (that might be wrong, but O.K.), but an Oil Refinery can do with Coal Liquefaction.
Steam turbines and steam engines respect the steam temperature and they produce energy relative to the steam temperature (limited by their max temp).

But Coal Liquefaction is a recipe that takes in N units of steam regardless of it's temperature. It's not going to use less steam because you use hotter steam.

So using steam from heat exchangers instead of from boilers you are wasting energy. But given that you can't make cold steam from uranium you might not have a choice.
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disentius
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Re: Extensible 5,494.08 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by disentius »

I am working on something like this atm. Here is what I have: a very simple extensible power plant.
First segment (start) is a 480 MW (4 reactors) build. you add 360MW (2 reactors) with every extension.
(the blueprint is in testing mode. you need editor extensions and magic lamp mods)

My design considerations:
- no big build needed to start
- no mods needed (but you can use them)
- able extend one row(2reactors) at a time
- uses all steam for power production.
- as close as possible to the "ideal" ratios for generators while not complicating the build. (overbuilt generators by about 1.05%)
- no steam tanks
- no fuel saving
- no pumps
- belt fed
- Separate electric network for inserters & logic
- timed fuel inserting




Paste the extention BP overlapping the last (top) row of the start plant
modular nuclear - extension.jpg
modular nuclear - extension.jpg (129.28 KiB) Viewed 3340 times
modular nuclear - start.jpg
modular nuclear - start.jpg (244.65 KiB) Viewed 3340 times

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Re: Extensible 5,494.08 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by mrvn »

disentius wrote: Wed Apr 26, 2023 4:44 pm My design considerations:
- no fuel saving
- timed fuel inserting
What's the point in that? If you aren't going to save fuel then just insert the 5 fuel cells each reactor can take.

Or are you worried that it will eat too many fuel cells to start up so you only get the first few reactors powered at the start?
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Re: Extensible 5,494.08 GW Nuclear Power Plant with Steam production

Post by disentius »

I want to make a smart version too, so might as well limit fuel intake in this one as the "base" concept for that.
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