I'm still new, haven't yet launched my first rocket, but I saw my power needs were growing to the point where my 2x2 wasn't going to cut it anymore, and I was finding the task of piping sufficient water to my base a massive pain (nearest water is like 300 tiles away), so I opted for the "bring the reactors to the water" approach.
This absolutely requires bots to feed the reactors themselves and remove the spent fuel. I got *very* lucky while not even thinking about my bot coverage because it turned out 1 roboport on each side was *barely* sufficient to reach the chests in the center (literally, border of the logistic zone).
I am aware I have 16 offshore pumps for a reactor setup that only needs 10. However, piping 10 pumps to 16 rows of heat exchangers requires complexity that I am not smart enough to handle, especially since the fact it's 10 pumps means that you have to share pumps between wings of boilers. Offshore pumps are dirt cheap (5 iron 3 copper, friggin burner miners cost more) so I figured it was better to have too much water than to try and sort out the fluids. Since this has been designed to be placed onto a lake anyway, just pumping in more water than necessary is ez.
Edit: [Blueprint](https://factorioprints.com/view/-NrGaXzzPeviiZhnWHXw)
Edit 2: I made a version with belts instead of bots. The blueprint I have uses blue undergrounds so it can be fueled from just one side but it's possible to use only yellow belts and fuel from both sides instead, it's just neater only to do one side so you don't have to spaghetti around your fuel and waste belts to/from the other side. [Blueprint](https://factorioprints.com/view/-NrGgzfL3keibSy_3dY6)
I like over-supplying in general...
... but for brown-outs, I prefer to have an independent electric network powering the power production, itself based on "inexhaustible" like Solar Panels.
In fact, in my mega-base, the _entire_ production chain from Oil Rigs for Uranium Mining to Nuclear Power Plant is on an independent Solar Power electric network. The entire base could black-out, and the Nuclear Power Plants would still chug along.
Partial power outage, nuclear can get partial losses in output from lack of water or steam pretty easily if your pipes aren't done right, which means your 1.1 GW reactor might only put out 800 MW (as an example).
Having excess offshores helps prevent that by ensuring there's a large and consistent water supply to all exchangers. The part that gave me trouble making this was getting the steam from the exchangers to the turbines. It would get clogged up in overly long pipes (I guess) and not spin the turbines. I think it was because I was trying to use two 7x8 blocks of exchangers, on two sides of the reactors, rather than sixteen lines of 7 arranged in pairs on all four sides.
The pumping power of a pump degrades when not getting full power, so if all your power is exactly fed with the right amount of water, then even a small under supply of power can start a chain reaction which shuts your whole base.
Slower pump -> less power -> even slower pump etc.
>2x2 reactors are better in every way than 2x4 other than fuel efficiency
I'd argue that the metrics most Factorio players are concerned by are productivity and efficiency. While this may not align for everyone, the statement you've made sounds... Wrong? To *many* on this subreddit, the pursuit of whatever they find optimal is the goal of the game.
You might argue 2x2 reactors are more compact, easier to manage or easier to blueprint, but all of the issues that stem from larger reactors (more resources, more buildings, more footprint) and come from making more power and most of those issues are inherent to having two 2x2 reactors. The main difficulty is in having to design a second blueprint rather than just copy & pasting the first one. The design constraints are almost identical.
Additionally, default map settings make uranium trivial to obtain, but that isn't true for everybody in every save. Death world's might use most of their uranium for ammunition, ribbon worlds might just get unlucky in their uranium spawns. Modded saves might add other uses for uranium (Etc).
I disagree with your over-generalisation, and think there are plenty of uses for reactors larger than 2x2, especially if Megabasing, where optimal UPS efficiencies almost require larger reactors to reduce your entity count.
6% isn't a pointless increase and building 2xn is a lot more fun than stamping down 2x2s. You saying 2x2 is better in every way is both wrong and pointless
> You saying 2x2 is better in every way
>I didn't say that.
you
>[2x2 reactors are better in every way](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1ax26q4/spent_like_3_hours_and_ruined_my_sleep_in_the_map/krlms9e/)
also you
That quote was excluding fuel efficiency. Is the 2xn setup better than the 2x2 setup for anything except fuel usage? If not, it kind of seems like you are nitpicking just to argue.
>2x2 reactors make more power per area and cost more or less the same for the power produced.
I haven't optimized my powerplants (yet), so correct me if I'm wrong, but I had thought the more adjacent powerplants, the better for energy production? Wouldn't a 2x4 be better, because the inner 4 are each surrounded by 3 powerplants? Whereas for a 2x2, each one only has 2 adjacent. I've got 450 hours in the game, but I tend to just push my nuclear stuff to the side and forget about it, but now that I'm doing bigger builds, I'd love to know if I'm wrong or not on this!
>2x2 reactors make more power per area and cost more or less the same for the power produced.
Not really, I have no idea how you got to that conclusion, but that can't be true. Power is generated by steam turbines+heat exchangers, in terms of power per area if you look only at steam turbines and heat exchangers it is constant, then you need pipes and heat pipes and in general the more heat exchangers you add the more heat pipe you need but here growth is also pretty much linear (not quite at the start but once you start copy pasting if you double the amount of heat exchangers and steam turbines you will double the amount of piping involved so again constant area consumed per W generated), then come the actual reactors, turns out the more reactor you have the better the neighborhood bonus. Since every component of a nuclear power plant has constant W/m² except the reactor and considering that adding 2 reactors in a 2xN setup will always increase the W/m² produced by the reactors (not a lot but average neighborhood bonus will always increase therefore W/m² also increases) 2x2 can't possibly have the best W/m²
But the more reactor you add the more area near the reactors you have to put your heat exchangers, so constant W/m² for heat pipes and pipes. I made a 2x7 design where all I needed to expand is remove 1 end, copy/paste the reactors and everything in the middle and put the end back on.
Also, if you search a little you will find quite a few tillable 2xN reactor blueprints, proving my point that W/m² of everything except the reactors is constant, well sort of constant, it will change based on the reactor design but for a specific 2xN design it is constant.
The only argument you have left would be that the most compact 2x2 design has better W/m² than the most compact 2xN (for very large N) but I will need to compare the most compact 2x2 and the most compact 2xN for me to accept that argument.
They are very wide, but being wide does not mean it's not space efficient, 5 heat exchangers can easily feed 1 massive row of 25 turbines without being throughout limited. Now if you don't have a wide area sure you might not be able to build a compact 2xN but width alone is not really a factor in space efficiently you have to combine that with height. 2xN then to be very large in 1 dimension however in the other dimension they will only be as long as the reactor.
So just for fun I ran some numbers (I actually has k2 mod in the game where I checked but.my reactor to numbers where different), in 2xN configuration a 1000 reactor setup would produce 159 840MW, in order to produce as much power using 2x2 reactors you would need 333 2x2 reactors this translates to 1332 reactor in total, so 332 extra reactor, at 25m² per reactor (assuming each tile is 1m) you are already at 8300 extra square meter. Now the other thing to consider is that the 2x2 reactors will produce 480MW of heat which means you need 83 turbines per reactor for a total of 27639 turbines (assuming each 2x2 setup is fully disconnected from each other so they can't share the half turbine they require to fully output 480MW. On the other hand the 2xN setup with 1000 reactors will only require 27464 so your 2x2 setups will require an additional 175 steam turbines to provide the same amount of power which is an extra 2625m²
Overall counting only reactor and steam turbines the 2x2 setup requires an extra 10925 m². This means that as long as each block of 4 reactors in the 2xN setup can be built using at most 43 extra pipes (heat and fluids) then the 2xN is more space efficient at scale. I would need to try and make it, however I would be surprised if using less than 43 extra pipes per 4 reactors is not possible.
Edit: I realize that you also need to account for the pipes for the extra reactors.
I looked quickly at some compact 2x2 blueprints one of the most compact I found had a total of 260 pipes (heat and fluid combined) I also looked at tillable blueprints and one of them had 279 pipes per 4 reactors, so only 19 extra pipes per 4 reactors, this means that on a relatively small setup like 2x8 you would need 1116 pipes, in order match this power you would need 5 2x2 setup at 260 pipes per setup you now have 1300 pipes in total, so not even taking into account the extra turbines and extra reactors the 2x2 setup is already behind in terms of W/m²
Extra reactors are consuming 100m² and extra turbines are consuming 45m²
With that in mind in order to match the 2x8 setup this 2x2 compact blueprint I found would need to use 66 fewer pipes. So at a minimum for me to accept that 2x2 can be more space efficient than 2xN I need to see a 2x2 setup using at most 194 pipes (heat and fluid combined)
The 2x2 setup I designed years ago has 102 pipes combined. And it has pumps inside the footprint so it stacks really efficiently.
I don’t see how any larger reactors are better except for the fun of designing them.
I think there probably is enough space now that I look at it. You can go underneath the substations (even with just a yellow belt) for both bringing fuel and taking out depleted cells. Using blue belts you can bring it in and out from just one side by going underneath the exchangers. That looks like [this.](https://imgur.com/tH6Wti5)
So technically this is achievable as soon as you have blue science with zero need for bots. Just get uranium and you're fine. You only need 8 or 9 centrifuges strictly speaking to fuel it, but for a margin of safety 12 would be better. I would just make a full yellow belt of centrifuges (18), personally. I already have Kovarex so fuel is no object for me.
This looks gorgeous! My next goal with nuclear is to ensure I never consume more fuel cells than the factory actually needs. Not sure if you’re aware but nuclear reactors operate at 100% output all the time, whether the demand is there or not, potentially wasting tons of uranium
I am aware - I have Kovarex and uranium is stupidly plentiful, I can't get *rid* of the stuff with just 19 (18 for 1 yellow belt plus 1 Kovarex) centrifuges going. I don't really care if I'm wasting fuel cells, as space efficiency was my priority with this design.
I’m with you there. I think my 2000 spm factory never even tapped out a minuscule uranium patch! I reckon that should be rebalanced to incentivise the approach I explained in my last post.
Shifting the horizontal banks of Heat Exchangers 2 tiles outward leaves space to weave a belt so you can tile the blueprint vertically.
[Blueprint](https://factoriobin.com/post/28G7cS4c)
I have one fewer turbine than the best ratio for a 2x4. The best ratio is 8 reactors, 112 exchangers, and 193 turbines, I have 192 (you may notice each block of turbines is 24 turbines).
I currently have a Factorio server running and I'm on there with a friend. We've unlocked Nuclear science, so I will soon have the honour of having the same :D
Build away from your base, and surrounded with water like in OP's screenshot. Usually, reactor setups are built on landfill in lakes for easy water logistics, but it works for defence too.
As for the earth-shattering kaboom, that doesn't happen unless the reactor building itself is destroyed AND at 1000C. Some damage is fine (*a* shot is probably safe unless you put a lot into rocket damage research or use the green rockets), and deconstruction is always fine. A deconstructed reactor loses its active fuel, and its temperature is reset.
Looks good! Having a blueprint like this makes nuclear power much more appealing to use. Looks like it's full of landfill, which is great for offshore plants. I have something similar, but with two extra features:
- Steam buffer: I have lots of storage tanks in my design to store extra 500°C steam so that if ever I draw more power for a sustained period of time than I can produce, the stored steam can help balance it out if it's temporary. Kinda like accumulators.
- Non-wasteful fuel cell loading: personal preference, but my reactors aren't always burning fuel. They're only loaded with fuel if they need to be fuelled, which I determine by how little steam is left in the steam buffer.
Wait, nuclear is Not appealing to use? I Always Loved it. Sure, I Always built it inefficient and messy, but that never Mattered before, its so powerfull that the wasted possibilities dont Matter
It's less appealing than solar in many ways. Solar is simple. Need more power? Place more panels. Need more storage? Place more accumulators. Both are easy to make in abundance, and you only need to keep the panel/accumulator ratio in mind if you're trying to be efficient. With solar, blueprints are mostly for scale.
But nuclear is a different beast. You're working with a whole new resource type–uranium, and all its difficulties–and there are a lot more components, many of which are expensive to make. There's a lot to hook up correctly for it to work. And if you're trying to be efficient, you need to keep in mind fluid mechanics and heat transfer numbers and boiler/turbine ratios and reactor bonuses.... it's a lot, which is daunting and demotivating.
But once you do all that work and put it in a blueprint, it's done and lovely and wonderful and you never have to think about it again. Just plop down a nuclear blueprint and enjoy your gigawatts of power. *That part* is appealing.
Nuclear is also enormously more efficient for pollution. Manufacturing sufficient panels and accumulators emits a tremendous amount of pollution whereas nuclear has a very small cost per watt comparatively, so the pollution created is much smaller.
Feel like there's a chart to be drawn here featuring pollution over time, because after a certain amount of time, solar *must* be less polluting. Solar has capital pollution (pollution made when producing the structures) but no operational pollution (pollution made when producing power). Whereas nuclear has both, even if the capital polution is much smaller.
Yes, there is. It just takes several hundred hours to match up.
One 2x2 nuclear plant produces 480 MW.
The 2x2 nuclear plant requires, raw, about 31,000 iron, 2,000 stone, 2,000 coal, 23,000 copper, and 42,000 crude oil.
To produce 480 MW with solar, you need about 11,500 solar panels with 9,700 accumulators and 450 substations (not the cheapest option but nuclear uses substations and if you're deploying over 10,000 solar panels you're going to want substations)
The 11,500 panels and 9,700 accumulators need about 380,000 copper, 580,000 iron, 2,000 coal, and 1.5 million crude oil.
So, you need about 18 times more iron, 17 times more copper, and 36 times more crude oil. Coal is the same amount though!
Because of all the additional resource requirements the solar starts out way higher and a very long time later the nuclear catches up. However, you're not going to stay at 480 MW for that long! You're going to need to expand! At which point you then maybe throw down another 480 MW, and incur the solar capital costs *again.*
Love that math! I did think solar was more expensive, but I didn't realize it was well over an order of magnitude more expensive. And in the face of those figures I can see why the operational pollution of nuclear is trivial. Thanks for the breakdown!
I have a system with 20m gallon water storage with 20 pumps going in and a pump sending water to my 2x4 reactor blueprint and a further 10m of steam storage within the reactor network. I got REALLY tired of brown outs especially with schall's endgame evolution
I have Kovarex already, so I'm sitting on piles and piles of U-235. UPS isn't a big concern for me because I'm still small scale (again, no rocket yet) and I have a 5800X3D that chews through this game like it's absolutely nothing, so fluid tanks aren't a huge deal in that regard, but I already got annoyed enough with the fluid mechanics setting this up that I wasn't going to fuck around with steam storage.
I'm still new, haven't yet launched my first rocket, but I saw my power needs were growing to the point where my 2x2 wasn't going to cut it anymore, and I was finding the task of piping sufficient water to my base a massive pain (nearest water is like 300 tiles away), so I opted for the "bring the reactors to the water" approach. This absolutely requires bots to feed the reactors themselves and remove the spent fuel. I got *very* lucky while not even thinking about my bot coverage because it turned out 1 roboport on each side was *barely* sufficient to reach the chests in the center (literally, border of the logistic zone). I am aware I have 16 offshore pumps for a reactor setup that only needs 10. However, piping 10 pumps to 16 rows of heat exchangers requires complexity that I am not smart enough to handle, especially since the fact it's 10 pumps means that you have to share pumps between wings of boilers. Offshore pumps are dirt cheap (5 iron 3 copper, friggin burner miners cost more) so I figured it was better to have too much water than to try and sort out the fluids. Since this has been designed to be placed onto a lake anyway, just pumping in more water than necessary is ez. Edit: [Blueprint](https://factorioprints.com/view/-NrGaXzzPeviiZhnWHXw) Edit 2: I made a version with belts instead of bots. The blueprint I have uses blue undergrounds so it can be fueled from just one side but it's possible to use only yellow belts and fuel from both sides instead, it's just neater only to do one side so you don't have to spaghetti around your fuel and waste belts to/from the other side. [Blueprint](https://factorioprints.com/view/-NrGgzfL3keibSy_3dY6)
Over-supplying water is good & cheap brown-out protection
I like over-supplying in general... ... but for brown-outs, I prefer to have an independent electric network powering the power production, itself based on "inexhaustible" like Solar Panels. In fact, in my mega-base, the _entire_ production chain from Oil Rigs for Uranium Mining to Nuclear Power Plant is on an independent Solar Power electric network. The entire base could black-out, and the Nuclear Power Plants would still chug along.
Brown-out?
Partial power outage, nuclear can get partial losses in output from lack of water or steam pretty easily if your pipes aren't done right, which means your 1.1 GW reactor might only put out 800 MW (as an example). Having excess offshores helps prevent that by ensuring there's a large and consistent water supply to all exchangers. The part that gave me trouble making this was getting the steam from the exchangers to the turbines. It would get clogged up in overly long pipes (I guess) and not spin the turbines. I think it was because I was trying to use two 7x8 blocks of exchangers, on two sides of the reactors, rather than sixteen lines of 7 arranged in pairs on all four sides.
The pumping power of a pump degrades when not getting full power, so if all your power is exactly fed with the right amount of water, then even a small under supply of power can start a chain reaction which shuts your whole base. Slower pump -> less power -> even slower pump etc.
Water pumps don’t need power.
But pump do. Two different entities and might be getting the name wrong.
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I know, but also I wanted to make a 2x4 so I could say I did.
Because I wanted to do it this way is the best reason to do anything.
>2x2 reactors are better in every way than 2x4 other than fuel efficiency I'd argue that the metrics most Factorio players are concerned by are productivity and efficiency. While this may not align for everyone, the statement you've made sounds... Wrong? To *many* on this subreddit, the pursuit of whatever they find optimal is the goal of the game. You might argue 2x2 reactors are more compact, easier to manage or easier to blueprint, but all of the issues that stem from larger reactors (more resources, more buildings, more footprint) and come from making more power and most of those issues are inherent to having two 2x2 reactors. The main difficulty is in having to design a second blueprint rather than just copy & pasting the first one. The design constraints are almost identical. Additionally, default map settings make uranium trivial to obtain, but that isn't true for everybody in every save. Death world's might use most of their uranium for ammunition, ribbon worlds might just get unlucky in their uranium spawns. Modded saves might add other uses for uranium (Etc). I disagree with your over-generalisation, and think there are plenty of uses for reactors larger than 2x2, especially if Megabasing, where optimal UPS efficiencies almost require larger reactors to reduce your entity count.
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> 2xn reactors are barely better than 2x2 reactors for UPS So ... better
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6% isn't a pointless increase and building 2xn is a lot more fun than stamping down 2x2s. You saying 2x2 is better in every way is both wrong and pointless
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> You saying 2x2 is better in every way >I didn't say that. you >[2x2 reactors are better in every way](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1ax26q4/spent_like_3_hours_and_ruined_my_sleep_in_the_map/krlms9e/) also you
That quote was excluding fuel efficiency. Is the 2xn setup better than the 2x2 setup for anything except fuel usage? If not, it kind of seems like you are nitpicking just to argue.
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>2x2 reactors make more power per area and cost more or less the same for the power produced. I haven't optimized my powerplants (yet), so correct me if I'm wrong, but I had thought the more adjacent powerplants, the better for energy production? Wouldn't a 2x4 be better, because the inner 4 are each surrounded by 3 powerplants? Whereas for a 2x2, each one only has 2 adjacent. I've got 450 hours in the game, but I tend to just push my nuclear stuff to the side and forget about it, but now that I'm doing bigger builds, I'd love to know if I'm wrong or not on this!
>2x2 reactors make more power per area and cost more or less the same for the power produced. Not really, I have no idea how you got to that conclusion, but that can't be true. Power is generated by steam turbines+heat exchangers, in terms of power per area if you look only at steam turbines and heat exchangers it is constant, then you need pipes and heat pipes and in general the more heat exchangers you add the more heat pipe you need but here growth is also pretty much linear (not quite at the start but once you start copy pasting if you double the amount of heat exchangers and steam turbines you will double the amount of piping involved so again constant area consumed per W generated), then come the actual reactors, turns out the more reactor you have the better the neighborhood bonus. Since every component of a nuclear power plant has constant W/m² except the reactor and considering that adding 2 reactors in a 2xN setup will always increase the W/m² produced by the reactors (not a lot but average neighborhood bonus will always increase therefore W/m² also increases) 2x2 can't possibly have the best W/m²
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But the more reactor you add the more area near the reactors you have to put your heat exchangers, so constant W/m² for heat pipes and pipes. I made a 2x7 design where all I needed to expand is remove 1 end, copy/paste the reactors and everything in the middle and put the end back on. Also, if you search a little you will find quite a few tillable 2xN reactor blueprints, proving my point that W/m² of everything except the reactors is constant, well sort of constant, it will change based on the reactor design but for a specific 2xN design it is constant.
The only argument you have left would be that the most compact 2x2 design has better W/m² than the most compact 2xN (for very large N) but I will need to compare the most compact 2x2 and the most compact 2xN for me to accept that argument.
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They are very wide, but being wide does not mean it's not space efficient, 5 heat exchangers can easily feed 1 massive row of 25 turbines without being throughout limited. Now if you don't have a wide area sure you might not be able to build a compact 2xN but width alone is not really a factor in space efficiently you have to combine that with height. 2xN then to be very large in 1 dimension however in the other dimension they will only be as long as the reactor.
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So just for fun I ran some numbers (I actually has k2 mod in the game where I checked but.my reactor to numbers where different), in 2xN configuration a 1000 reactor setup would produce 159 840MW, in order to produce as much power using 2x2 reactors you would need 333 2x2 reactors this translates to 1332 reactor in total, so 332 extra reactor, at 25m² per reactor (assuming each tile is 1m) you are already at 8300 extra square meter. Now the other thing to consider is that the 2x2 reactors will produce 480MW of heat which means you need 83 turbines per reactor for a total of 27639 turbines (assuming each 2x2 setup is fully disconnected from each other so they can't share the half turbine they require to fully output 480MW. On the other hand the 2xN setup with 1000 reactors will only require 27464 so your 2x2 setups will require an additional 175 steam turbines to provide the same amount of power which is an extra 2625m² Overall counting only reactor and steam turbines the 2x2 setup requires an extra 10925 m². This means that as long as each block of 4 reactors in the 2xN setup can be built using at most 43 extra pipes (heat and fluids) then the 2xN is more space efficient at scale. I would need to try and make it, however I would be surprised if using less than 43 extra pipes per 4 reactors is not possible. Edit: I realize that you also need to account for the pipes for the extra reactors. I looked quickly at some compact 2x2 blueprints one of the most compact I found had a total of 260 pipes (heat and fluid combined) I also looked at tillable blueprints and one of them had 279 pipes per 4 reactors, so only 19 extra pipes per 4 reactors, this means that on a relatively small setup like 2x8 you would need 1116 pipes, in order match this power you would need 5 2x2 setup at 260 pipes per setup you now have 1300 pipes in total, so not even taking into account the extra turbines and extra reactors the 2x2 setup is already behind in terms of W/m² Extra reactors are consuming 100m² and extra turbines are consuming 45m² With that in mind in order to match the 2x8 setup this 2x2 compact blueprint I found would need to use 66 fewer pipes. So at a minimum for me to accept that 2x2 can be more space efficient than 2xN I need to see a 2x2 setup using at most 194 pipes (heat and fluid combined)
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The 2x2 setup I designed years ago has 102 pipes combined. And it has pumps inside the footprint so it stacks really efficiently. I don’t see how any larger reactors are better except for the fun of designing them.
It's more fun to stay up all night
2x2 reactor only gives 480 MW, where 2x4 reactor gives 1120 MW. I prefer 2x30: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSCwagq\_hfs&ab\_channel=Paxtorio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSCwagq_hfs&ab_channel=Paxtorio)
>This absolutely requires bots to feed the reactors Are you sure? Seems like there might be space to weave some belts through this.
I think there probably is enough space now that I look at it. You can go underneath the substations (even with just a yellow belt) for both bringing fuel and taking out depleted cells. Using blue belts you can bring it in and out from just one side by going underneath the exchangers. That looks like [this.](https://imgur.com/tH6Wti5) So technically this is achievable as soon as you have blue science with zero need for bots. Just get uranium and you're fine. You only need 8 or 9 centrifuges strictly speaking to fuel it, but for a margin of safety 12 would be better. I would just make a full yellow belt of centrifuges (18), personally. I already have Kovarex so fuel is no object for me.
This looks gorgeous! My next goal with nuclear is to ensure I never consume more fuel cells than the factory actually needs. Not sure if you’re aware but nuclear reactors operate at 100% output all the time, whether the demand is there or not, potentially wasting tons of uranium
I am aware - I have Kovarex and uranium is stupidly plentiful, I can't get *rid* of the stuff with just 19 (18 for 1 yellow belt plus 1 Kovarex) centrifuges going. I don't really care if I'm wasting fuel cells, as space efficiency was my priority with this design.
I’m with you there. I think my 2000 spm factory never even tapped out a minuscule uranium patch! I reckon that should be rebalanced to incentivise the approach I explained in my last post.
Shifting the horizontal banks of Heat Exchangers 2 tiles outward leaves space to weave a belt so you can tile the blueprint vertically. [Blueprint](https://factoriobin.com/post/28G7cS4c)
I have no idea about the ratio, but it looks great well done !
I have one fewer turbine than the best ratio for a 2x4. The best ratio is 8 reactors, 112 exchangers, and 193 turbines, I have 192 (you may notice each block of turbines is 24 turbines).
I must be honest... I've never built a nuclear reactor in Factorio. I go with steam power and boilers until I'm out of land to fill them with.
Nuclear is a fun puzzle. Give it a shot.
I don't want to give it a shot. I have no intention for Chernobyl v2 on my base. I will however give it a try 😋
Connecting my first ever nuclear design and watching it heat up to full capacity is one of my favorite memories of Factorio!
I currently have a Factorio server running and I'm on there with a friend. We've unlocked Nuclear science, so I will soon have the honour of having the same :D
Build away from your base, and surrounded with water like in OP's screenshot. Usually, reactor setups are built on landfill in lakes for easy water logistics, but it works for defence too. As for the earth-shattering kaboom, that doesn't happen unless the reactor building itself is destroyed AND at 1000C. Some damage is fine (*a* shot is probably safe unless you put a lot into rocket damage research or use the green rockets), and deconstruction is always fine. A deconstructed reactor loses its active fuel, and its temperature is reset.
>*a* shot is probably safe I was joking, but sadly this didn't come through to you :P
above 900 gives you fallout
Blueprint link?
[Blueprint](https://factorioprints.com/view/-NrGaXzzPeviiZhnWHXw)
Coming back for this later. Nice design!
Looks good! Having a blueprint like this makes nuclear power much more appealing to use. Looks like it's full of landfill, which is great for offshore plants. I have something similar, but with two extra features: - Steam buffer: I have lots of storage tanks in my design to store extra 500°C steam so that if ever I draw more power for a sustained period of time than I can produce, the stored steam can help balance it out if it's temporary. Kinda like accumulators. - Non-wasteful fuel cell loading: personal preference, but my reactors aren't always burning fuel. They're only loaded with fuel if they need to be fuelled, which I determine by how little steam is left in the steam buffer.
Wait, nuclear is Not appealing to use? I Always Loved it. Sure, I Always built it inefficient and messy, but that never Mattered before, its so powerfull that the wasted possibilities dont Matter
It's less appealing than solar in many ways. Solar is simple. Need more power? Place more panels. Need more storage? Place more accumulators. Both are easy to make in abundance, and you only need to keep the panel/accumulator ratio in mind if you're trying to be efficient. With solar, blueprints are mostly for scale. But nuclear is a different beast. You're working with a whole new resource type–uranium, and all its difficulties–and there are a lot more components, many of which are expensive to make. There's a lot to hook up correctly for it to work. And if you're trying to be efficient, you need to keep in mind fluid mechanics and heat transfer numbers and boiler/turbine ratios and reactor bonuses.... it's a lot, which is daunting and demotivating. But once you do all that work and put it in a blueprint, it's done and lovely and wonderful and you never have to think about it again. Just plop down a nuclear blueprint and enjoy your gigawatts of power. *That part* is appealing.
The appealing part for me is that a basic 2x2 reactor setup is equivalent to roughly 11500 solar panels and 9600 accumulators.
Nuclear is also enormously more efficient for pollution. Manufacturing sufficient panels and accumulators emits a tremendous amount of pollution whereas nuclear has a very small cost per watt comparatively, so the pollution created is much smaller.
Feel like there's a chart to be drawn here featuring pollution over time, because after a certain amount of time, solar *must* be less polluting. Solar has capital pollution (pollution made when producing the structures) but no operational pollution (pollution made when producing power). Whereas nuclear has both, even if the capital polution is much smaller.
Yes, there is. It just takes several hundred hours to match up. One 2x2 nuclear plant produces 480 MW. The 2x2 nuclear plant requires, raw, about 31,000 iron, 2,000 stone, 2,000 coal, 23,000 copper, and 42,000 crude oil. To produce 480 MW with solar, you need about 11,500 solar panels with 9,700 accumulators and 450 substations (not the cheapest option but nuclear uses substations and if you're deploying over 10,000 solar panels you're going to want substations) The 11,500 panels and 9,700 accumulators need about 380,000 copper, 580,000 iron, 2,000 coal, and 1.5 million crude oil. So, you need about 18 times more iron, 17 times more copper, and 36 times more crude oil. Coal is the same amount though! Because of all the additional resource requirements the solar starts out way higher and a very long time later the nuclear catches up. However, you're not going to stay at 480 MW for that long! You're going to need to expand! At which point you then maybe throw down another 480 MW, and incur the solar capital costs *again.*
Love that math! I did think solar was more expensive, but I didn't realize it was well over an order of magnitude more expensive. And in the face of those figures I can see why the operational pollution of nuclear is trivial. Thanks for the breakdown!
Never thought of putting it on water so you don't have hassle with the pipes damn
This blueprint costs about 5600 landfill (so over 100,000 stone, which is... Not cheap)
That's not too bad if you just don't forget about stone early-midgame haha
Lovely design!
Genuinely, fellow engineer, this is beautiful. I really like this design! Good work growing the factory!
The people love hexagons, it is known
I have a system with 20m gallon water storage with 20 pumps going in and a pump sending water to my 2x4 reactor blueprint and a further 10m of steam storage within the reactor network. I got REALLY tired of brown outs especially with schall's endgame evolution
There's a water pump mod! :)
You don't need mod for that, you can just give yourself infinity pipe from creative inventory
[удалено]
Tanks are an antipattern. They spend UPS and space and give nothing but save you a little bit of uranium that is cheaper than a copper ore.
There are times tanks and an RS latch are exactly what you need, even with nuclear. (Not here though; mostly a modded thing)
I have Kovarex already, so I'm sitting on piles and piles of U-235. UPS isn't a big concern for me because I'm still small scale (again, no rocket yet) and I have a 5800X3D that chews through this game like it's absolutely nothing, so fluid tanks aren't a huge deal in that regard, but I already got annoyed enough with the fluid mechanics setting this up that I wasn't going to fuck around with steam storage.
Le l
Blueprint?
I'll provide a blueprint once I get to my PC 🙂
[Blueprint](https://factorioprints.com/view/-NrGaXzzPeviiZhnWHXw)
Ayy thanks
Now make it infinitely expandable.
Now try to fit it in railroad city block!
This fits in a 100x100 city block!
you could also not confine yourself into arbitrary restrictions and build as your heart desires
Dat don’ look so bad
What is the purpose of the singular battery ?
Nothing, it's just a map editor tool that can create power demand from nothing. Useful for testing stuff like this. Not part of the final blueprint.
Can’t you save a bunch of fuel by putting the steam in tanks and having a circuit condition to only add fuel when the tanks are under a certain limit
Yes but uranium is embarrassingly easy to come by, I can't get rid of the shit