Nuclear power OP

[leadraven]

The main thing about nuclear is that you waste a lot of energy into thin air.

Agree, uranium gives not a fixed amount of power, but more like nearly infinite power for limited time. And this time is huge compared to infrastructure required. That's what I don't like. It gives too much energy for too little effort.

You don't need to waste any energy. You can store the heat excess energy as heat in the heat-pipe and reactors, and as steam in tanks. When the steam in the tanks starts dropping you can add a new fuel cell.

Ooooh, that's a nice trick! To control fuel flow and let reactors to cool down...

[JimBarracus]

The main thing about nuclear is that you waste a lot of energy into thin air.

not when you control it with logic circuits.
use tanks to store unused steam
use heatpipes to store excess heat
use akkus and a sr latch to toggle the nuclear power

letting it run 24/7 is very inneficient
small changes can improve it a lot

[Stakhanov]

Solar power has the benefit of not requiring any maintenance at all , so in the long run nuclear power is inferior if you have arbitrary space available. Nuclear power needs to be rewarding as it's the highest energy tech , having the greatest spatial power density is a good attribute for it. It's not as cheap as you think - besides the massive setup costs of reactors , heat pipes , exchangers , steam turbines and centrifuges , there's also uranium outposts to build , defend and connect with railway , and that process cannot be fully automated.

I agree that the kovarex process may be a bit too good , maybe the reaction could require some light oil-based coolant ? Something to add to the mostly irrelevant u-238 cost. There aren't many ways to nerf it that make sense , it's already an expensive tech that unlocks a time-intensive process.

[nafira]

The main thing about nuclear is that you waste a lot of energy into thin air.

not when you control it with logic circuits.
use tanks to store unused steam
use heatpipes to store excess heat
use akkus and a sr latch to toggle the nuclear power

letting it run 24/7 is very inneficient
small changes can improve it a lot

First : I agree with leadraven, letting reactors cooldown is not the solution for your main central.

Then :
I have 2 centrals of 8 cores each. One is my main source of energy, the other is launched for emergency only by reading global electricity storage (I builded a huge amount of accumulators to have time to heat up the reactors).
This central is launched when accu are at less than 70% capacity, which gives me a lot of time to prevent any trouble. Also have a decent amount of steam is I have uranium problem.
Here is my "logic cicuits"

Using tanks is great, thanks, I think your the first to invent the idea
More seriously, if you are to store every steam you produce, it's going to be a mess, as said before, you need to shut down reactors to do so, which is still not the solution.

Heatpipes ! Yeah, at 1GW consumption it's very useful ! and the footprint isn't massive at all.

Last but not least : as said before you don't cool down your main reactors, only your backup generator. It's like shutting down a server and reactivating it (taking time) when used. No, you let it on idle state. That's basics.
You can shutdown a part of a cluster of servers in load-balancing, but not shutting all down.

Solution provided :
The only "energy management" you can do is not having a 40 cores central just to prevent spikes. It's useless, and then the control of it is a nightmare.
You'd better split it into 5 or 4 different centrals, sharing the same tank backup to prevent energy problems and fast recovery time (even no need for reactivating other centrals), and activated only at certain level of energy shortage.

This is a good management. You waste a bit of energy, but your backup is here and controlled by accu and steam storage (a bit, no need to store it all)

This way you lose a bit of steam on your first central (which is nothing), but not putting you factory in danger and not building a nightmare of logic to be 100% efficient.
And another plus : I use a different electrical circuit with solars and accu to power pumps, arms, and bots, so it can't get affected by energy shortage


PS :
use sentences
use punctuation
don't just throw "do it" lines

It's very annoying to read these kind of "let me teach you poor ignorant" posts.

[bobucles]

The main thing about nuclear is that you waste a lot of energy into thin air.

Take a look into the some smart reactor blueprints. It is possible to build a reactor that uses only the fuel it needs with circuits. The trick is to measure steam storage, since that's the only part of the reactor you can plug into.

[Jeeto]

In 0.17 map generation Uranium will spawn farther from starting area so you won't be able to start mining it and stockpiling enough for Kovarex enrichment so early on. And oil patches will be farther out as well so you won't get sulfuric acid to mine the uranium until later in the game too. I think this will get rid of some of the overpoweredness of nuclear cause you'll need trains and circuit network to effectively mine, refine, and enrich the uranium (not to mention Nuclear + Kovarex research is very costly)

[nafira]

In 0.17 map generation Uranium will spawn farther from starting area so you won't be able to start mining it and stockpiling enough for Kovarex enrichment so early on. And oil patches will be farther out as well so you won't get sulfuric acid to mine the uranium until later in the game too. I think this will get rid of some of the overpoweredness of nuclear cause you'll need trains and circuit network to effectively mine, refine, and enrich the uranium (not to mention Nuclear + Kovarex research is very costly)

Yes, but it's just a matter of time. We're talking about long term balancing, not starting.

There's simple ways (I said it in another topic) to reduce nuclear OP'ness :

• only recover iron plates from old cells
• a Kovarex run "produce" 80GJ every 50s for around 300kJ ==> this is madness, because it's nearly free
  • change to 10 min and double energy consumption
  • add new item like rocket fuel to power centrifuges instead of electricity or Steel bar or more U-238 needed

Kovarex is OP, not nuclear itself.

[Nasabot]

Nuclear power is decent for mid and lategame, but for the ultimate lategame, solar power is still the best because it has a "divide by 0 dynamic" in it.

Uranium feels overabundant, I agree that the kovarex enrichment recipe should cost more dark green uranium.

[bobingabout]

I think the only thing OP about nuclear power is the Korvarex process.

[theolderbeholder]

Only until all your U235 goes into nukes.

[Hannu]

Only until all your U235 goes into nukes.

You must have quite interesting biter expansion settings, if you can use all nukes which simple building row of few centrifuges can produce. You need couple of hundreds to clear reasonable area for megabase, but Kovarex produces easily hundreds of thousands of U-235. I think it has thought to be an ultimate endgame solution for all needs without huge ups-hungry production plants. Maybe there could be some development stages. Like basic Kovarex, which would cost like current but take 10 times more time to produce a cycle. And super Kovarex, which would cost space science too and produce like current process for megalomanic megabase builders.

[Jeeto]

Only until all your U235 goes into nukes.

Or thousands of rounds of Uranium Ammo, cause not only do you have practically limitless electricity from uranium 238, but with u235 you can defend the base at 0 watts of electricity cause gun turrets are magic

[theolderbeholder]

Only until all your U235 goes into nukes.

You must have quite interesting biter expansion settings, if you can use all nukes which simple building row of few centrifuges can produce.

Or I like to blow things up. Your call.

But quite a lot of my 238 (which I might turn into 235 for nukes) goes indeed into Uranium Ammo. `Cause, I like to shoot at things, too. And I rarely use lasers until we can mount them onto sharksfish.

[Hannu]

Or I like to blow things up. Your call.

You must run quite far away to find anything to destroy after using couple of full inventories of atomic bombs.
Maybe you use nukes instead of deconstructing planner.

But quite a lot of my 238 (which I might turn into 235 for nukes) goes indeed into Uranium Ammo.

I have used only gun turrets in my last games and found that if I have normal uranium ore patch with couple of millions of ore it lasts hundreds of hours for uranium ammo, atomic bombs and nuclear powerplants. I need just few tens of miners, short row of centrifuges and nothing fancy or special. I even do not use any control logic but let reactors run at full power all the time. It is hard to believe severe lack of uranium or nuclear products based on that experience. Of course you can make troubles with poor settings, if you want.

[BlueTemplar]

This sounds like there's just too much uranium on the map itself...

[nafira]

I have a map with normal setting, and I found 9.3M uranium patch.
Several 500k+ and 1 or 2 2M+ patches not far.

With my +100production technology and modules so 130% more, I have around 40M uranium to get. And I already used a good 2M at least on this map.

So to be poor on uranium, you must have set map setting to high for other resources, preventing the apparition of uranium patches.

[TN_Creator]

I'm currently playing my first map with nuclear power, after 120 hours of play with 0.13.x version.

While I really like the fact that the setup is less basic than for solar panels or fossil fuel, and needs a lot of attention before being fully autonomous, I think U-235 is far too abundant.

It is maybe because I'm in mid-game only (~40 hours and getting to the last yellow-tier research, nuclear bomb) but with one average uranium patch, I'm already saturated with u235 and nuclear fuel. The only thing that seems to actually use resources at a decent rate is the piercing->uranium rounds conversion (I play without laser turret).

With two reactors, regulated nuclear fuel input (zero heat waste), steam storage and a Kovarex setup working well, this single uranium patch will last without any doubt beyond the point where i'll get bored and start a new game.

[quyxkh]

Factorio's got the costs about right. Designing a nuke plant's the hard part, running it's dirt cheap. We used to use breeder reactors to make other fuel-ready fissiles, except there's so much U ore lying around there's no point, it's lots easier to just dig it up, put it in the merry-go-round and give it a hotfoot and out comes as much U-235 as we could ever want.

[Selvek]

Nuclear is fine, and modules are fine...

It takes a very long time to get a base to where your Kovarex process is producing effectively unlimited nuclear fuel. So, it's not like you're ever going to skip huge fields of solar panels. Then, once you really get Kovarex up and running, you're spared the burden of constantly putting down more and more bigger and bigger solar fields at an accelerating rate... which by late (post-rocket) game becomes really tedious. You still have to expand nuclear power pretty frequently in end game - it's definitely not free. (Based on my 10 science/second base).

Modules and beacons are fine. T3 module are INCREDIBLY expensive to produce - they absolutely should be powerful. You're not going to be able to afford them until very late, and at that point you're probably making a base plenty big enough that T3 modules don't exactly feel OP. Plus, they add the logistics challenge of how to get huge quantities of items into and out of extremely compact layouts.

Which brings me to... logistic bots ARE broken and OP, because you shouldn't be able to have infinite bots delivering to the same chest at a time. It doesn't make sense physically. Belts should be the kings of high throughput at the expense of layout complexity, while bots should be geared towards lower throughput but much simpler layout. Simple fix - pickup or dropoff from a chest requires a short time delay, and only 1 bot can do it at a time.

[BlueTemplar]

Uranium is so plentiful that it seems like that you don't even need Kovarex.

Between coal and oil, you can totally skip solar if you want to.

That's why Requester chests is a late-game tech...