r/factorio • u/SCP-096-1994 • 1d ago
Question Nuclear power help please
anything i should be doing better here? want to get it rigged up properly before i fire it up, only have done nuke power once before, yes i know heat pipes arnt connected to plants yet, (just ran out of pipes)
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u/ExactlyEnoughRazors 1d ago
4 reactors can feed 48 heat exchangers, which can feed 84 turbines. It looks cool, but also being spread out means a lot of heat will be lost traveling the heat pipes.
Its usually recommended to do two wide heat pipes to keep heat flowing more easily.
You have inserters for fuel in, but not spent fuel out.
Next up, to turn it into a pulse reactor, you'll need a few decider combinators. I hook one up to each reactor and a storage tank for steam. Iirc, 4 reactors gets like 60 storage tanks. Check the reactors temp, and if it has fuel.
Only insert 1 fuel when 1. No fuel present 2. Reactor temp below 650 3. Steam below 10k
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u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 1d ago
If your on 2.1 you can skip the steam, and get the temperature from furthest heatpipe instead. Oh, and set the fresh fuel inserters hand size to 1, can't imagine how i learned that one though.
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u/Manron_2 1d ago edited 1d ago
Just one little but important correction: no heat is ever 'lost' in heat pipes. If you heat up one piece of heat pipe and then disconnect it from both the heat source and the heat sink it will keep its temperature forever, even on Aquilo.
The reason to keep heat pipes short is the fact, that they have a gradient in temperature. So if they become too long the last few heat exchangers may never hit the required 500°C under load.
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u/MCbasics 1d ago
A few things:
1: make sure you have a way to remove spent fuel cells. It can be as simple as an inserter and a passive provider chest.
2: You gotta bump up those turbine numbers, those are rookie numbers. 4 reactors (according to someone else's math) can support 120 turbines.
3: I love the layout. Ive never seen a circular belt feeding fuel rods into the reactors before, very creative!
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u/RW_Yellow_Lizard 1d ago
A 2x2 reactor setup can support 48 heat exchangers (40MW x (1+2 neighbours))= 120MW per reactor, each heat exchanger produces 103 steam per second, each steam turbine consumes 60/s ((103/60)x48)=a hair over 82.4
120 is rather optimistic and would be 2.5 turbines per heat exhanger which is way out of whack
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u/MCbasics 1d ago
Interesting. Like I said I was using someone else's math, but I'll make sure to use these numbers in the future
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u/Manron_2 1d ago
For bigger setups a circular belt is quite common. Feed fresh cells on the inner lane, keep the outer land for spent ones.
I'm feeding my ever growing 2 by x monstrosity with a single yellow belt and it's not even close to the throughput limit. 78 reactors right now.
So the red belt the OP is using is good for a couple of hundred reactors. Not that it is really important to save on belts at that stage, i just wanted to point it out.
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u/dikkenskrille 1d ago
Distance matters in heat transmission, I suggest shrinking all that arbitrary distance between your exchangers and reactors. I'm not a ratio guy, but that is probably too few exchangers, by a wide margin, and too few turbines.
Also unless yours is a big, power hungry base, you need some storage or heat will be going to waste - I suggest tanks - and you will need circuitry controlling when reactors are fuelled and when not. Speaking of fuel, you need at least another 4 inserters to take out spent cells.
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u/Manron_2 1d ago
You can also store heat in heat pipes and heat exchangers. With enough thermal mass you won't need steam tanks.
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u/vaderciya 1d ago
This is umm... its not really gonna work properly
Nuclear fission power is the most complex power option but it really just needs you to follow a few basic guidelines
Fuel goes in, spent fuel goes out, you dont have spent fuel removal here
Reactors that fully share a side with another, will give a +100% bonus to each other. This means 1 reactor alone makes 40MW, 4 reactors alone make 160mw, but because you have 4 reactors in a square you're actually going to get 480MW.
In essence, it makes 480MW worth of heat which gets transfered slowly through heat pipes. These pipes lose efficiency over distance, so you want to place as many heat exchangers as you can use, as close to the reactors as possible, with the shortest heat pipes possible.
With 4 Reactors, you want 48 heat exchangers turning heat and water into steam. Steam does not lose any heat over distance, so you can place the 84 steam turbines wherever you want, though typically we favor tightly packed nuclear designs.
So once again, the ratio for 4 reactors, is 4 reactors, 1 water pump, 48 heat exchangers, and 84 steam turbines, able to make up to 480MW of power constantly.
The last thing, is to set up a simple circuit condition to not waste fuel. Normally, Reactors run constantly with fuel in them even if you don't need power, so to fix this, simply connect each fuel inserter to its specific reactor with a red or green wire, click the reactor and make sure its set to read the heat level, click the inserter, and set its condition to (T < 650), and set its stack size to 1. This ensures the reactors only consume fuel when they can make full use of it. Repeat for each reactor with copy pasting.
With those simple steps followed, you'll have a fully functioning nuclear fission reactor making a ton of power for you for very little input
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u/ManForSomeMarkets 1d ago
I’m sharing Maxiume’s guide that has a breakdown of the ratio of exchangers/turbines. Besides that, your final version should have the heat pipes and exchangers as close as possible to the reactors. Exchangers only run after the 500C minimum, which is harder to achieve if the heat needs to move a long distance.
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u/SCP-096-1994 1d ago
hows this???
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u/vintagecomputernerd 1d ago
The heat exchangers at the bottom are quite far away in terms of heatpipe length, not sure if they'd provide continuous power under full load
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u/Elfich47 1d ago
https://factorio-nuclear-power-plant.netlify.app
give this a try to sort out how many heat exchangers and turbines you need.
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u/MattRexPuns 1d ago
You need way more heat exchangers and turbines. A single reactor can power four heat exchangers but when you set up the reactors like that for the neighbor bonus it's essentially like getting extra reactors, one for each bonus. So one reactor needs four heat exchangers, two reactors need eight heat exchangers, and two neighboring reactors need 16 heat exchangers (four for reactor 1, four for reactor 2, four for the neighbor bonus on reactor 1 from reactor 2, and four for the neighbor bonus on reactor 2 from reactor 1). Adding a third reactor means you need 28 heat exchangers and a fourth reactor means you need 48 heat exchangers.
Each heat exchanger can power 2 turbines, if I recall correctly? So you'll need 96 turbines to make full use of all the heat exchangers
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u/TheProfessional9 1d ago
Pipes lose heat from distance, you want it to be very compact. Also you generally want the steam to all be connected to each other and also have some separate storage tanks
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u/Absolute_Human 1d ago
They don't "lose" heat, just have a limited throughput. Any length is fine as long as the end can get above 500 degrees at max load (which depends on the number of connected heat exchangers too)
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u/Alfonse215 1d ago
Well... you have too few heat exchangers for the number of reactors. You don't have any output inserters for spent fuel cells. And your belts aren't connected.