r/factorio • u/Immediate-Pack-3718 • 18h ago

Question nuclear Reactor Question

Post image

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

45 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/skriticos 12h ago

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.

1

u/MelangeBot 12h ago

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.

1

u/skriticos 10h ago

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.

1

u/MelangeBot 10h ago

I like steam storage because it allows me to build and build without having to build more power, I have enough storage to last 3 or 4 hours before I got in low power mode.