Friday Facts #164 - Nuclear power

[Karamel]

The reactor generates heat and has a temperature. The more nuclear fuel it has inside, the more heat it generates and more thoroughly it burns the fuel (easy to accomplish both by making fuel burn at fixed rate but heat generation depend on the amount of fuel inside). If gets too hot, it'll explode and destroy nearby buildings.

There's no way to remove fuel, just wait for it to burn off.

The reactor has two modes: Safe and Unsafe.

In the Safe mode, the reactor will regulate its own fuel intake based on its temperature. It will limit its fuel - and thus heat generation - to the level where it has time to burn it all off before going kaboom. Of course, this means the reactor will produce much less power than it would actually be capable of.

In the Unsafe mode, the reactor will accept all fuel offered to it, up to its real limit. This means you'll have to control it via circuits, and likely have an emergency bypass system to dump steam directly to cooling towers if the turbines aren't using enough.

So there you have it: either rely on the reactor's own safety systems, which are guaranteed to keep it safe under all circumstances but lack awareness of anything beyond the reactor vessel itself, or turn them off and push it to the limit with the understanding that you'd better know what you're doing.

[AcolyteOfRocket]

Nuclear reactors should not go boom if they are maloperated in this game, its straightforward enough to automate them in real life and factorio is a game about automation.

However in real life we don't have biters, so I think they should go boom if they are chewed on. Its up to the player to "secure" the facility.

Also in real life engineers don't carry flamethrowers and rocket lanchers around, although they do have some tank-like vehicles to drive.

[Andrzejef]

Nuclear reactors should not go boom if they are maloperated in this game, its straightforward enough to automate them in real life and factorio is a game about automation.

However in real life we don't have biters, so I think they should go boom if they are chewed on. Its up to the player to "secure" the facility.

Also in real life engineers don't carry flamethrowers and rocket lanchers around, although they do have some tank-like vehicles to drive.

Agreed - they should turn down, unless destroyed (not deconstructed - either biter-related, or ramming, or shooting). Then they can blow up.

[mrvn]

You (can) get an explosion from the cooling materials. The water becomes steam, gets even hotter, pressure rises and at some point BOOM and you have a large steam cloud. Worse if the inner cooling circuit blows because that tends to be radioactive I think.

Anyway, if we have to have an explosion, I like the idea of the reactor not blowing itself up totally. Because if it does then the construction robots would just build a new one and all you get is a short power drop. Just make sure you have a spare reactor in storage at all times and a melt down is quickly over. Would be more painful to have the reactor vent a large cloud of radioactives that damage stuff in a largish region around the reactor. Destroy some nearby belts, damage surrounding assemblers, blow up construction robots that fly through the cloud to soon. But leave an unusable reactor behind. So the user has to go and remove / deconstruct it before placing a new reactor. No automatic fixing the mistake so it actually hurts.

I think robots SHOULD be able to repair and replace the reactor, regardless of it if blows up completely or not, robots should automatically fix it if available and within roboport range. If you make it so robots can't repair or replace it, then you break a part of the functionality of the game, ie you make construction robots useless for this situation. This is not a good idea. If you are at the late stage of the game, the whole fixing/replacing should be automated as it is for everything else. Introducing exceptions is a bad idea. This isn't a competitive online game, if you don't like robots fixing your reactor, you could just not use them where your reactor is. Also, remember that this whole game is about automation. Preventing automatic repair would go against this.

So build your reactor repair center that watches the health of the reactor and if it blows you deconstruct it and reconstruct it. My point was that a blown reactor should take longer (or take more work) than a bit of belt destroyed by a biter.

[RobertTerwilliger]

Fair enough. I'm more worried about them being so explosion-prone that they are a permanently very high-maintenance option in a game basically all about making things low-maintenance for yourself. In which case, why bother when coal and solid fuel is always a great low-maintenance option for massive power generation and solar is even less maintenance-requiring?

That maintenance thing is a good point and in a game about automation, I would personally love to automate even the last particle of dust. So, just automating the reactors to produce energy would be a first, but to compete against all that maintenance stuff, clearly speaking to automate this as well, would be level 2. And therefore the wiring fits in perfectly. So, the more you put effort in that, the less time you need for maintenance afterwards. So, if you are saying "high-maintenance", there still has to be the possibility to get it to "no maintenance", if you install a security system properly.

I guess that is clear to everybody. I just wanted to recall it.

This!
People, nuclear power wouldn't be must-have, it'll be an option. E.g., now some people build gigantic expensive fields of solar pannels and accumulators, other prefer searching for coal.
Nuclear power will just add another camp in this field.

Considering we already have "no maintenance" and "resource insertion" power types, it'd really be logical to have "circuit-controlled" automation level.

Actually, we have one already: it's hybrid power, but after power switch and circuited accumulators, it became just "if CHARGE < 10% then TURN_ON; if CHARGE > 30% then TURN_OFF" or even simplier. BUT this system usually is used only as a stage from start building solar fields and up to mass production of pannels and accumulators - usually about few hours, no more...

[rlerner]

Count me on the "it explodes" camp.

Back when you would mine a chest and all of the contents would spill in a nice spiral around the chest, I would place these in complicated belt areas and blow them up just to add an element of chaos or destruction to the game (without biters). I enjoyed fixing the factory, and seeing if I even understand what I was doing with that area before.

Some people have suggested the explosion be weak, others said to make them difficult to explode.

I've played with the reactors mod, which doesn't explode, however I found that (with minimal circuit wiring), they are extremely reliable and fun to tweak. In the real world, a nuclear disaster can be devastating. I dislike the idea of programmatically reducing (or enhancing) the size or frequency of the explosion, rather, I think that it should be planned out and tied in so that users will build them far from the heart of their factory, and take time to learn them. Nuclear reactors aren't really complicated, and the failure modes are quite obvious even after a brief read of the Wikipedia article. Peaceful mode is obviously an option to prevent them from blowing up, but I think it is a dynamic worth introducing. Nothing like leveling a few chunks or having splash damage to destroy all belts and inserters but not the assemblers, etc.

Besides, this is what the construction robots are for. It blows up, you don't even notice.

[parth718]

I would love to see nuclear power..... but about the processing .... please don't make it like the uranium power mod because it sucks, why would i do so much processing if i can have more power with steam or solar (space is not a problem).And i loved the transfer heat by material idea

[MalcolmCooks]

Yeah I don't think the uranium processing needs to be super complicated, but it shouldn't be too simple either. Most of the proposed processing methods seem too complicated for me, especially when bringing in new items like flourite and yellowcake that are only going to be used as intermediary steps in the processing. Nothing else in factorio is only used for one thing, and I think it would be a mistake to start introducing that. Enrichment of uranium should definately be a seperate step though, because depleted uranium can be used in millitary technology for armour-piercing rounds and shells, radiation sheilding, and advanced armour plating - all real uses of depleted uranium, and I'm sure nobody will mind making up some new sci-fi uses.

[cheetored20]

I've had a thought, so here's a proposed alternative to the reactor explosion, that still remains dangerous and has it's own "cool factor".

Instead of outright exploding if it gets too hot, since "no steam" = "no steam or hydrogen explosion" what if the problem is just plain ambient heat.

With everything running normally, the building behaves normally like any other building. As the heat grows however, the building starts to gain adverse effects.

At the first stage of meltdown, it starts burning nearby foliage and flammables. Trees, basic power poles, grass tiles, etc. If it can be expected to burn it will. Which also gives a excellent reason to build away from forests and use paved flooring where possible. The radius of this effect grows as the meltdown progresses.

At the second stage of meltdown, the reactor gains a damaging aura: Nearby mobs including biters, the player and even logistics and construction robots are damaged if they come too near. As with the first effect, the amount and radius of the damage increases as the reactor grows hotter. A noteworthy possibility here is that anything that tries to deconstruct the building at this point, robot or human, will take a certain amount of damage.

Only at the third and final stage do non-wooden buildings start taking damage, including the reactor itself. The fun part here is that the second stage effect of the meltdown at this point prevents construction robots from just fixing things, as the repair robots themselves will die in droves. Likewise it may well be so hot that it cannot be deconstructed without the robots dying, requiring the (well shielded) player to run in and dismantle it themselves in order to avert destruction.

As a visual indicator, these auras can be shown through as an ambient heat haze that progresses to an eerie red glow as it starts to burn flammable objects, to an unhealthy orange glow that burns biters players and robots, and finally build up to a white hot blinding glare as it the reactor finally melts itself- and everything around it, into a puddle of glass and steel.

Now, here's the really fun part: With the exception of the third and final stage, none of this impedes reactor efficiency. It should be fully possible to hold the reactor at a ridiculously high temperature, creating a field of death and destruction, and have it just as efficient, or even more efficient, than it is normally.

In the latter case it's not just a dangerous technology, it's a potentially quite safe technology that actively rewards you for playing dangerously with it. And I think that fits pretty well into Factorio's themes. Not only do you have the sense of "Am I the bad guy?" but it adds another layer to the "easy to learn, hard to master" side of things as the highest efficiencies also have the least margin for error.

this seems PERFECT to me, especially if it rewards you for being dangerous

[Dev-iL]

Hello

I had a little thought recently, as we have nuclear energy, what about nuclear warfare ?

Two ideas:
1: Depleted uranium shells - great for stopping big creatures, maybe used in artillery train.
2: Nukes - we have rocket fuel, we have control modules, we have some plutonium or whatever. All we need is shell from steel and enrichment plant. After each use of nuke are becomes ultra polluted so MarkII suit is needed to withstand radiation, building built in region experience damage from radiation and evolution factor jumps by 1%.

I would like to know what You think about this

You're in for a treat