- Reactor 2x6.jpg (1.64 MiB) Viewed 9465 times
Features:
- Intelligent roboport coverage to make building as painless as possible
- Autostart. No manual fuel cell insertion required.
- Uses logistics network for fuel cell supply. No belts, no wasting of fuel cells lying around on a belt.
- Fuel cell saving by using steam buffers. Inserting new fuel cells is postponed until buffered steam level is low. The plant was tested with 160 MW (10% of max power output) and no overheating to 1000°C happened.
- Is able to provide 100% power. Not a single tick reactor downtime if full power is required.
- Blueprints include landfill for all buildings.
- Layout prevents unwanted automatic power connections.
- Two independent power grids to avoid reactor shutdown if the external power grid has a brownout. The internal power grid is solar powered.
- Audible alarms if the internal power grid is out of power (cannot happen, but just to be sure) and if the fuel cell supply is low.
- Steam gauge to see current steam level.
- A stripped down 2x2 version (480 MW) of the 2x6 layout is also provided. Can be used as start, then upgraded to a 2x6 layout by just removing a few pipes and building the 2x6 blueprint over it.
- Optimal steam flow due to enough (but not too many) pumps.
- The provided blueprints are intended for the south shore of a lake. If you want to start from the north, rotate all by 180°.
- Find a lake and build the "Reactor 2x6 supply" blueprint first. It sets up the initial roboports and the service infrastructure for fuel cell insertions. You have to build it in multiple takes, with shift-click, since at the beginning there is no full roboport coverage yet. Keep an eye on the 6 rectangular holes left and right. This is where the offshore pumps will go, so these must enclose water.
- After the supply blueprint has been fully built, set the "Reactor 2x6" blueprint over the supply buildings. Use the 2 reactors as anchor: they must overlap the 2 south reactors from the reactor blueprint.
- If you want to add another field, add another "Reactor 2x6" field to the north. No supply blueprint. It's only required once for a whole tiled setup.
- To start the reactors, disable or remove the constant combinator south outside of the reactors. While active, it inhibits the counter that inserts a new fuel cell every 200 seconds. You need to wait 200 seconds till the first insertion. Time to check if everything has been built correctly.
- While building you will hear 2 alarms: one is the "internal power grid has zero power", which goes away as soon as everything has been built and there's daylight. The other one is the "out of fuel cells" alarm, which goes away as soon as enough fuel cells are found within the logistic network.
A decider combinator is used as counter. It counts from 0 to 11996 + 3 = 11999 ticks = 200 seconds. The 3 additional ticks are latency introduced by the inserters, so the counter needs to count 3 ticks less.
3 steam storage tanks are tapped with green wire, so a steam volume between 0 (0%) and 75000 (100%) can be detected.
The inserters for the fuel cells are triggered if the counter reaches 11997, and if the steam level is below 37500 (50% steam level).
To check both conditions simultaneously within the inserters, the counter actually counts backwards from 0..-11996, so by adding 11996 to the counter and -37500 to the steam level, the condition can be EVERYTHING < 0.
If the inserters were triggered, each will insert a single fuel cell. The inserter arm content is read as pulse, and this is the reset condition for the counter, which restarts at 0. So the counter is reset if fuel cells have actually been inserted. All reactors are refilled simultaneously in the same tick.
In the supply blueprint, there is a tiny builder mall with infinity chests and a power consumer grid. I used these for development and debugging. In a real world map, they cannot be built of course, so you might just remove them from the blueprint. At these locations, it's supposed where the logistics network from outside is connected, and where the main power grid is connected.
Smaller 2x2 Reactor blueprint:
I included a stripped down version of the big reactor field with only 4 reactors (480 MW). Useful if you don't want to move your nuclear plant later. To upgrade it to 2x6, remove all underground pipes (apply the included deconstruction planner over the whole plant), then overlay the plant with the 2x6 reactor blueprint. Should fit and exactly add all remaining entities.
Make sure you don't remove any "unused" power poles from the supply blueprint. Their presence prevents automatic unwanted copper cable connections while adding a reactor blueprint. If you do, the internal power grid will be mixed with the external power grid and the reactors cannot autostart any more. If you messed with the power grids, just deconstruct every power pole, then re-add them by first setting the supply blueprint, then the reactor blueprint.
Supply blueprint (only set 1 supply for a whole tiled setup, no matter the size):
2x6 Reactor blueprint:
(See next message due to message size limit)
2x2 Reactor blueprint:
Remove underground pipes for 2x2 -> 2x6 upgrade:
Images:
Build supply first:
- Reactor Supply.jpg (1.09 MiB) Viewed 9465 times
- Reactor 2x6.jpg (1.64 MiB) Viewed 9465 times
- Reactor 2x2.jpg (954.44 KiB) Viewed 9465 times
- Reactor 2x6 tiled.jpg (1.6 MiB) Viewed 9465 times
- Reactors 156 tiled.jpg (969.95 KiB) Viewed 9465 times
- Reactor power info.jpg (203.8 KiB) Viewed 9465 times
- Reactor power grid tiled.jpg (215.99 KiB) Viewed 9465 times
You can add one radar in the empty field opposite of the central roboport. But don't add a radar to every reactor tile - there's not enough energy for this on the internal power grid.
I Never thought about this possibility. I probably stole this trick 
