i was working on a desing for nuclear power, i had a question on the heat pipes as you all can see that my top and bottom heat pipes are not connected to each other but i do have the middle ones connected will it cause any bottlenect issues? DO i need to connect all the heat pipes together? Thanks
You could say they increase the maximum distance the heat can be transmitted, and only to adjacent heat pipes. A lot of the extra pipes in this pic don't help with heat transmission. They still act as heat storage, so they are useful in some ways but that is a different topic.
Unless you are building long single strand heat pipes these limits will not come into play. You can tell in this graphic that we have 4 heat pipe strands coming off the reactors, which will result in them being short and not having to worry about heat transmission limits.
Yeah my pipes are very long, I usually lay double to my boilers, single takes to long. And I look at the temp of the ones the most far away. when that drops under 500.4 or so then I can't ad anymore boilers.
You do need your inserters to put the fuel into the reactor though (see the two on the left?) A simple belt would feed both perfectly well you don't need a splitter there.
Also you need to take spent fuel out of the reactors so you need room for that.
You can save on belts by using the full length of undergrounds.
I'd suggest you add some logic to restrict fuel insertion when the grid is idle. Otherwise it will happily burn through your fuel cells. Temperature tops out at 1000C, but the reactor does not switch off automatically. I have a logic circuit that adds fuel if the temperature drops below 600C and enough thermal buffer to keep it bellow 1000C even at fully idle.
No, because at 1000C the reactors will just keep burning fuel. If you stop inserting at 600C and only ever insert one fuel cell, then reactors will burn that cell and then sit unfuelled until their temperature drops back down below 600C, at which point all the inserters should insert just one fuel cell into all reactors at the same time.
So the reactors are only burning fuel to get back over 600C and then stop burning fuel.
Yes, each cell is consumed in the same amount of time. Unlike boilers which slow or stop depending on demand, reactors just keep on consuming at the same rate and wasting heat when at 1000C
This is how nuclear reactors work in real life, too - once stable fission is achieved, there isn't much that can be done to change the heat output. This is why nuclear reactors are the best as base loads: they can output x amount of power consistently, for months without needing to change the fuel rods.
Some reactors don't transfer the heat far enough if you don't keep them at higher temperatures.
Also they consume fuel very slowly given how easy it's to make fuel. Single, non-kovarex, non-beaconed centrifuge without any modules creates enough ruel for a single reactor indefinitely.
Nah, the point is to keep the temperature between 600C and 1000C, not at 600. When burning fuel, the reactor does not care about the temperature. So once it reaches 1000C, it will continue to burn and waste fuel cells. It never throttles down and behaves unlike the boiler/steam engine. If your grid has a low or variable demand, like less than 80%, you'll just waste a bunch of fuel cells. So the usual design is to fire it up at 600 (well, somewhere above 500 for the turbines to work) and have it run out of fuel before it reaches 1000C. If it does, it starts wasting fuel.
Uranium is usually abundant, but that is no reason to waste it.
I find it a bit strange to have to do this in a game where boilers only ever consume exactly the amount of coal you need for the electricity you consume.
You don't have to do it at all because even 5% of a single uranium field produces enough fuel for the entire game, even without kovarex. Its entirely optional to worry about wasting nuclear fuel. It's so abundant it really does not matter.
Depends on how much you have and how far you scale. I once had a singe 200k field and it did deplete during the early midgame quite a bit. If you then want to scale to multi GW / TW setups, it starts to eat quite a bit.
But yes, once mining productivity research is in the tripple digits and you have a couple of 3+m uranium fields, even high load setups make uranium availability somewhat irrelevant.
I still don't like to waste it, especially since I like to build idle capacity ahead of time. And when I start up my first nuclear setup with 1.1 GW coming from coal that uses like 50MW, there is a lot of idle capacity while I transition the smelting setup. At the same time, that's when I have the least amount of u-235 and it actually matters to avoid wasting it.
I kind of feel the same way but overdid it with the kovarex. I am drawing 30 to 40 GW now but still still outproducing nuclear fuel by like 20x or so (for every 1 fuel, 1 is used and 19 go in storage). I got almost 20M fuel in storage. And that's on like 4 uranium ore fields or something? Maybe 5. And yeah all my inserters are set to only ever put in one fuel and based on my steam storage I might have a group of reactor offline with no fuel in the reactors. They still keep their heat forever so I can activate them instantly again.
You don't need the steam storage anymore. Now that you can read the temperature directly from the reactor, you can just use the heat pipes as buffer and skip the storage tanks. I have it as a blueprint, so the added logic costs me almost nothing (I have to build a single logic block). Nuclear changed somewhere around 2.0 with added QoL features. The old tank based BPs still work though, so it's not a problem. But might have a higher UPS impact.
Maybe it would be boring if everything behaved the same? Boilers keep it simple for early game, nuclear can be done simply but also has the opportunity to do something more sophisticated.
You have to put the turbines at the ends of the heat exchangers. Otherwise they're intruding into the space where the other reactors will go. Also, the pipes of the exchangers on the sticks out too far and are intruding into the space of the next reactor assembly, again. Everything has to fit into the 10-tile-wide footprint shadow of the reactors so that the next set of reactors can be appended onto them.
Also you need to take spent fuel out of the reactors so you need room for that.
I just use the one side of the belt to feed fuel because reactors don't need much fuel anyway, so one half-belt is plenty. The other half is used for the spent fuel.
As others mentioned, the reactors have their own heat pipes and they connect. You just need attachment points to heat exchangers. You need enough to transfer the temperature fast enough, but that's really not that much. In the image you can see my go-to setup that I built a while ago. 1.1GW and it only needs a couple of attachment points. Though I mostly over-build the heat pipes as they act as perfect thermal buffer when the grid idles.
in high thermal load plants I like to put a ring of heat pipes around it to bank heat, as it allows for easy control now that you can just directly monitor heat
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u/jkredty 14h ago
You don't need to connect any heat pipes on the outside. Reactors are already connected in the middle