Backstory:
With everyone having their own "infinitely tileable" nuclear setup, I wondered how infinite those actually are.
I've built my own setup, likely very similar to everyone elses (2x2 reactors, 2x2x16 heat exchangers, belts for fuel input and output, flanked by tanks and turbines) and placed a bunch of them.
I've found two issues with it:
- the slice itself would barely fit in the pipe limit without any tanks, but I need tanks to avoid wasting energy. This can be fixed by adding pumps to split the segments, but that makes the power plant require some other power source to start (rather than just manually inserting a fuel cell), and opens the possibility of starving the pumps and stalling the whole thing.
- After 64x2 reactors, I get limited by the pipe limit in the perpendicular direction. This means I'd need to add pumps on the water input (or play tricks such as building on landfill and having pumps in the middle of the power plant), which I didn't necessarily have space for.
Now this was already a respectable 20GW power plant, but definitely not the largest possible. Since I had linked both halves of the heat exchangers, I could move all tanks and turbines off to one side, meaning I had a relatively narrow slice (~110 tiles wide) of steam generation with steam consumer to the other side.
At this point, I've changed the goal a bit - I'd consider a single power plant anything that has all the heat exchangers connected to a single pipe segment, not just a single row of reactors.
With my design at the time I could *almost* fit 3 copies of the same setup into a single pipe segment, but I'd need to trim it a bit.
Since I had my heat exchanger "wings" directly connected to the reactors, they had to be aligned, creating a bunch of space between them. This is where the fuel inserters were next to the reactors, but further out it was just wasted space. I've replaced this with a design that has a mesh of heatpipes around the reactors and fuel belts, with densely packed heat exchangers next to them. While this added a bit of distance between the reactors and the heat exchangers, it allowed me to reduce the heat exchangers from 16 per line to 10 per line, saving a bunch of width.
This was actually a massive saving, allowing me to just barely fit 4 copies into one pipe segment, resulting in a ~80GW steam generator. I've eventually added 4 more reactors sticking out from one end since I had more heat exchangers than heat generation (these have to stick out one end rather than being centered,because I need the other end to link the steam pipes), ruining the square aesthetic but giving a bit more power.
The design:
The power plant has a single pipe segment-sized block with heat exchangers and reactors (the "core"), flanked by 2 steam tank storage blocks (~10k tanks each, the most that fit in a single pipe segment - not because it's needed but because I can), with turbines off to the side and top. Each pipe segment is connected by *a lot* of pumps.
Everything is normal quality except for uncommon pumps between the core and the steam tanks - there is just too much steam for normal pumps to handle even if there is 640 of them. The water input pipes are also uncommon, but this is just for aesthetics - I have space to add more to get sufficient throughput with normal ones, I just chose not to.
Water needs to be fed from another pipe segment using ~86k water per second (75 or so normal water pumps)
I haven't tried scaling the entire thing up with quality, but I suspect the heatpipe throughput will become the bottleneck pretty quickly
There are 3 separate electric networks:
- and "external" network that powers the rest of your factory with 80GW of power
- an "pump" network that powers the pumps using a few dedicated turbines with an oversized steam storage to avoid starvation. (technically there is two of these, one for each side, not connected together)
- a "input" network that uses solar and batteries, powering the fuel inserters, the fuel control circuit, the water input pumps and a few steam pumps to feed the tanks and turbines powering the internal network.
For redundancy, the pumps between the steam storage and turbines are powered both by the external and the pump network. This makes it a pain to build, as there are power poles next to each other that should *not* be connected. Hopefully this is fine in the blueprints.
There's also a fallback mechanism that would bridge the "input" and "pump" networks if the pump network runs out of steam.
With those combined, there should be no way to stall the power plant, as long as there is fuel on the belt and the used up fuel is being taken off the belt.
There's 3 small logic circuits:
- one that controls the fuel inserters based on a tick counter and steam storage level
- one that balances the two sides of steam storage
- one for bridging the "pump" and "input" electric networks
Screenshots:
Zoomed in:
- Zoomed.png (13.12 MiB) Viewed 63 times
- Complete.png (89.76 KiB) Viewed 63 times
Blueprints:
complete core steam tanks (place 2x with symmetry) primary turbines (place 2x with symmetry) secondary turbines (place 2x with symmetry)