Using mass amounts of water with Large Nuclear Build

[Rylant]

So in my previous games I have used a water fill mod to help with water and large nuclear builds. This most recent build, I have gone modless so that is not an option. I am using about 4 GW of energy, so it is quite a bit of water needed. I am at the point where I am going to move from steam power to nuclear, and I prefer to not use solar.

I know that some people have landfilled in a lake leaving channels for water for nuclear, but that doesn't seem like much of an option for me. I don't think I have appropriately sized and shaped lakes to do that. So I have been using a water train. Sadly, I have not been able to keep up with the demand with my water train.

So are there any other options I might be missing? Does Factorio ever intend on implementing some kind of water fill as part of the base game?

Thanks,
Rylant

[Rylant]

I guess I should have looked at this other thread first. Definitely some good ideas there...

Rylant

[Amarula]

I am afraid I no longer have the map, but long ago I did try delivering water by train to a nuclear reactor.
It was small, only 2x2 reactor core. I think I had 4 rows of heat exchangers, and each row had a water tank or maybe two. The train station had 8 water tanks. I had 4 water trains, each with two fluid wagons. I completely filled all the water tanks and refilled all the trains before connecting the water supply. The water source was close by (less than a minute for the round trip) and there were no other trains using the tracks or the water source so no waiting. It was working but it was pushing the boundaries of what was possible: each train unloaded at max speed, and left, just as the next train was arriving to unload, so at any one time I had one train unloading, one train coming, one train loading, and one train going. It was fun to watch!
And once I upgraded to 2x4 reactors it couldn't keep up any more.
Isn't Factorio fun?

[BlueTemplar]

Hmm, maximum nuclear power using "train-ed" water challenge ?

[eradicator]

The simplest option is to give up on building a single monolithic reactor and build a bunch of smaller reactors. For 1GW (8 core) you only need a tiny lake. And fuel is so cheat that it really doen't matter. And UPS wise a few more cores don't really matter because the main load comes from the heat/pipes/exchangers/turbines.

If you want to go with trains you could try building several seperate parrallel train lines each with just one train that goes back and forth.

Look at the first picture in this post where each side is fed from a 26x5 lake.

[coppercoil]

I think you can still use pipes, just shape your lake in HHH form and double the shoreline. Following setup provides 2400 water/s per pipeline, that’s a lot.

WaterSupply.jpg (719.16 KiB) Viewed 4374 times

Delivery by train can achieve even higher throughput per tile but station design becomes really weird

[hale42]

it should only provide 1200 due to the pipe section just before the 1st pump right? unless I'm missing something

[BlueTemplar]

As a reminder :

EDIT: Caveats :
- these values are only likely to be accurate for a straight pipe without intersections
- direction of travel is likely to affect throughput
- the order in which the pipes have been laid out is likely to affect throughput
- testing has likely been done with tanks on both ends (&pumps), with any other kind of fluidbox at the ends, results might be (slightly?) different

[eradicator]

Never had a usecase for this myself, but theoretically an uninterrupted pump-tank line should have full pump speed independant of distance. It also reduces the number of required pumps by 50% compared to five parralell pump-underground lines. You just need to figure out how to pump in/out at the endpoints.

screenshot_12175.jpg (703.15 KiB) Viewed 4292 times

[coppercoil]

Fluid tank is expensive too . But actually neither price is important for extreme players
Five pipelines can provide 15000 fluid/s instead of 12000, also giving some space for others communications.
Damn, I counted three lines across the tank

[Ezarkal]

My approach would be to put multiple water trains on your track, with stackers to avoid blocking your rail network (if any). If you put 3-4 pumps per wagons for loading/unloading, they will roll pretty fast. You can also make parallel unloading stations if that's not enough.

I'm currently running a bob&angel train-based base, and my water trains currently load/unload 50k water in about 8 seconds with the right setup, for 2 wagon trains. You may not be able to reach this speed on the base game, but with multiple pumps per wagon and multiple trains on the track I'm pretty sure you can feed pretty much any monster of a powerplant.