The final big challenge here is to automate fuel loading. There are pumps between my rows of tanks, all pointing north: since the turbines are up there, you want to make sure that steam doesn't pool at the bottom when you need it up top. There are 2 double rows of exchangers (48 in total, 4 per effective reactor). Here's the basic reactor/exchanger/tank setup:
FACTORIO NUCLEAR REACTOR SETUP PLUS
That's 40 tanks, plus some wiggle room if you want to run the reactors before the steam reserve gets empty. That extra 16% efficiency isn't a game changer, but the 200% efficiency gain from going from 1 reactor to 4 definitely is.Ī single burn from 4 reactors would produce almost 1M steam by my above calculations. A 4x2 setup produces 28 reactors of output-2.33x the heat for 2x the cost. This seems to be the sweet spot-it's a huge improvement on a lone reactor or 1x2 reactor, but diminishing returns kick in hard above 2x2. A 2x2 reactor setup gets 3x neighbor bonuses on each reactor, giving you 12 reactors worth of output. Observation 2: there's no reason not to go big. A lot of this actually rolls in after the fuel stops burning-the heat exchangers keep making steam and drawing heat until everything is back to 500 degrees. Some simple testing showed I could get a bit more than 80,000 steam (4 tanks worth) from the burn of a single fuel cell in a warmed up lone reactor.
![factorio nuclear reactor setup factorio nuclear reactor setup](https://i.redd.it/trh6mypisy501.jpg)
Nuclear reactors, heat pipes, heat exchangers, and steam don't cool down below 500 degrees, so no energy gets lost and the setup starts producing energy immediately once you restock the fuel. At 25k steam per tank, and 5.8 MJ per 60 steam in a turbine, a single tank holds more than 2.4 GJ, the equivalent of 480 accumulators. This has a pretty simple solution: store steam in tanks. You can get the efficiency of a large installation with the demands of a small one, and only burn new fuel when your energy bank is low. Observation 1: if you can bank the energy from a fuel burn, you can build a large plant and only consume the fuel you need. With a couple of key observations, I made it work. Since nuclear reactors burn fuel at a constant rate regardless of consumption, this took a bit of planning. Since I still want to save the precious U-235 for Kovarex as soon as I get enough, though, I wanted a setup that would get a good exchange rate for the U-235. Once I was running out of coal patches within easy belting distance, I decided I'd rather jump to nuclear than build a dedicated coal train for power. However, I found that once I was burning 40-60 MW reliably, keeping boilers stocked with coal started getting tiresome. Some folks suggest that you shouldn't start burning U-235 until you have Kovarex enrichment and enough U-235 to get it rolling. Finally got it working, and I thought I'd share. The reactor, heat exchangers and heat pipes won't be able to hold all that, so you'll also want some steam tanks, each of which stores 25*97=2.425 GJ.Spent a couple days testing, planning, and crafting this power plant. Ideally you want enough total heat capacity to store the total energy of one set of fuel cells (one per reactor). Each fuel cell produces 8GJ plus the neighbour bonus (so a reactor with two neighbours gets 24GJ from each fuel cell, one with three gets 32GJ). A reactor can store 5GJ, a heat exchanger 500MJ, and a section of heat pipe 500 MJ. In practice, I'd suggest rounding up to 2 pumps per reactor to offset the flow restrictions from all those pipes and to simplify the layout (pumps are cheap).Īlso: heat capacity matters if you aren't running close to 100%. For a 2x4 block, multiply by 3*4+4*4=28: 112 heat exchangers, 193 turbines, 10 pumps. For a 2x2 block of reactors, multiply by 3*4=12: 48 heat exchangers, 83 turbines, 5 pumps. IOW, for every 40 MW, you need 4 heat exchangers, 6.873 steam turbines, and 0.344 pumps. A steam turbine consumes 60 units of steam per second, which is 5.82 MW.
![factorio nuclear reactor setup factorio nuclear reactor setup](https://opengameart.org/sites/default/files/reactor_render01.jpg)
An offshore pump produces 1200 units of water per second, which is enough for 116.4 MW. Fresh water is at 15☌ while the steam produced by heat exchangers and consumed by steam turbines is at 500☌, a difference of 485☌, so you need 1 unit of water for each 97kJ, which is roughly 10.3 units per MJ. It takes 200J to heat 1 unit of water by 1☌. A reactor produces 40MW, plus another 40MW for each active neighbouring reactor.