Thank you! I got back into Factorio this month and made it to the end game, but I've never tried to do anything with uranium. This helped me fully understand the entire process! Also thank you for providing blueprints.
Thank you for making this, It was desperately needed for me and my factory, it needs 200 mw maximum but getting to the materials for this is slowing this factory to a halt.
I just wanna thank you for this Nilaus. I've always got to nuclear and just found a blueprint and stamped it down. I thought nuclear was complex and I just wanted to get to the rest of my factory. It was also exasperated by the amount of complex blueprints available. Crazy blueprints doing very complex Kovarex processes, making it even harder for me to understand how nuclear works. While I did use your blueprints, the difference is in their simplicity and my understanding. I used the blueprints because it was easier, not because I didn't understand it. I'm yet to set up my spent fuel cells recovery machines, but all in the process is working well and I understand it at every step. Thanks!
Thank you so much for the blueprint. I did everything by myself so far, however I decided to focus on different things by myslef and use your blueprint to save some time.
AFAIK heat pipes can only permanently lose a fixed amount of energy, unless you really screw up. In the simplest case, you have a reactor and a heat exchanger connected by a single heat pipe. Your reactor will heat up to 1000 C when you turn it on, which will heat the pipe to 999 C, which will in turn heat the heat exchanger to 998 C. If you then turn off the reactor, and start using the steam, the heat exchanger will cool down to 500 C, the pipe will cool down to 501 C, and the reactor will cool down to 502 C. So, on the pipe, you lost (999 C - 501 C) * 1 MJ/C energy permanently, but only once. Subsequent cycles will lose no energy. The way to really screw up is to put all your reactors and heat exchangers on a single line. A heat pipe can only transmit 1 GW, so it won't cool the reactors enough, and they will waste power. What I like to do is build "too many" heat exchangers for the amount of reactors, and "too many" turbines for the amount of heat exchangers, and add some storage tanks. If you do it right, the reactor temperature always stays below the maximum. If it does not, you need more tanks, or your control circuits are broken. This way, the reactors, pipes and heat exchangers all act as energy storage, and it's quite a significant amount. Each reactor stores 5 GJ, each heatpipe stores 1 MJ, and each heat exchanger stores 500 MJ as heat. (Slightly less depending on your layout.) A heat exchanger also stores 19.4 MJ in steam, same as a steam turbine, a pipe stores 9.7 MJ, and of course, a storage tank stores 2.425 GJ. I like to count all these free energy stores by boxing them, then add tanks to have enough storage for 2 rounds of fuel cells, and set up control electronics so that only 2 are inside a reactor at any time. Don't add more fuel if there isn't enough free storage for it. You can get away with less storage if you can estimate the consumption somehow, and take that into account. I didn't do that yet, and I have no good idea how I would. Then there is also the formidable challenge of getting the water in, and getting the steam out. The latter is especially nasty, because the game will tell you everything is fine, if the steam is blocked, you must not be needing that energy. This is not an exact science, at least until the new fluid mechanincs are implemented. But you can build the entire thing on a landfill island, and have water right where you need it. Then use an unnecessarily large amount of pumps to get the steam out.
@@toddkes5890 You could but you'll need a LOT of trains. A medium size 16 reactor (2.4 GW) power plant would fill a fluid wagon in slightly over a second. It would be 40 tiles long, meaning you could park two 2 + 5 trains on the two sides. They both have to leave, and two new ones have to arrive every 10.1 seconds for this to work. And this is average for full utilization, you'd need more during surge demand. How many trains this needs depends on the distances. You also have to consider the time delay. If you have steam turbines connected directly to the steam tanks, and power lines running to your outpost, the plant can respond pretty much instantly to power spikes. You will need some storage locally to smooth these out and give the trains a chance to react. But maybe you'll end up with a smaller plant, all things considered. There is a lot of storage at the outpost stations and in the trains themselves, and you only have to stop the reactors if all of that is getting full. (Assuming your train logic knows to "push" steam even if an outpost doesn't really need it yet.)
@@toddkes5890 As long as train delivery does not become a bottleneck, this will work. But that should not be a problem for 6 reactors. I'm not so sure about larger ones. Also consider you will necessarily have some storage tanks on the receiving end, and a fluid wagon is a storage tank on wheels. So you could get away with building less than 80. Keeping track of those amounts can get tricky though, especially if you don't have a global circuit network.
One thing you've missed - steam does not dissipate. You can store steam in tanks like any other liquid resource. Putting tanks in the steam system as buffers works well.
I guess I am doing something right, as I am getting 803MW of power. I have the 2x3 reactors with 80 heat exchangers and 138 turbines. The problem I had is getting the water to flow correctly.I had the ratios right but I had to split up the turbines so each line of pipes goes to a certain number. 8 exchangers -> 17 turbines; roughly. Though my design is not all neat and compact. I used to use pumps to get the water to flow at a decent rate. Even though I have a lake nearby, sometimes water isn't as easy to come by; so you can bring it in by train or have robots move packaged water and that is a whole another setup to get right.
@ Nilaus Try Conecti the the wagon pump after the water pump then the pipe and then check the steam levels you get basically it pushes true more water to make more steam in one heat exchange you get around double the output in power
Suggestion for a Tutorial: (avid followers know it already) but your red/green starter base with blueprint would be a sweet starter if you made it into a short tutorial - although its in the start of your vanilla series
so the centrifuge has a build option that has the same output as the input and with production modules now has a higher output. INFINITE POWER! why would this option not be the first thing you build with nuclear to support the nuclear power plant. also thank you i spent an hr trying to figure this out. had not realized i research nuclear power was just mindlessly researching while building.
One thing I ALWAYS do is building auxiliary power network (solid fuel powered, I float in this crap bu this point) dedicated to making more uranium (Kovarex is cheap enough to get), then expand to about 4 Centrifuges (with maxed out speed modules) for good stuff. I personally use slightly different design with "buffer" steam tanks and some extra piping thrown in for good measure (pipe throughput actually matter here if you botch design), basically one reactor + L-shape boilers and tanks where you have turbines. the reason for this is I can use tanks, pumps and circuit network to control fuel inserters (I rarely get tho the point when I actually need to run whole setup constantly.
Always informative, and enjoyable. I've been working on kovarex enrichment, seeing if I can't make something good. My setup works (only one quirk), but it seems slower that your demo here. Dang it Nilaus, why you always making me think?!?!
Firstly, I don't actually play Factorio, I just love watching your streams and seeing how you do things. Saying that, I have no idea whether this idea would work or not (or even if it would be efficient), but would it be possible to put the storage tank between the heat exchanger and the steam turbines then set up some sort of logic circuit so when the storage tanks drop to a certain level the reactor gets fed another uranium? If that would work then wouldn't the steam turbines connected to the tank run at full capacity? Love your videos, especially the 4hr streams you've switched over to your Nilaus.tv channel. Keep em coming :D
I have my input inserted set to only input 1 fuel cell, when it detects a pulse from the output insteryers removing a spent fuel cell. The output inverters will only remove a spent fuel cell when my steam tank has
So the power plant is always running, no matter if you need the power or not? Could you build the 6-nuclear plant first, but then remove 2 power plants, so you can build those later when needed?
I have 2 nuclear reactors producing way more than they should according the the ratios described by the wiki site. I have two nuclear reactors touching on one side (3 connections) with heat pipes running to 38 heat exchangers and 75 steam turbines. This all produces 437 MWs! The wiki said max for 2 reactors should be: 2 reactors for 16 heat exchangers and 28 turbines for a max power total of 160 MWs. Both my reactors temperatures are stable not decreasing at 800 C and the coolest heat exchanger is at 601 C all stable not decreasing. What am I missing here?
Yep and since he has more turbines it's even more important to keep them saturated with water. heat exchanger uses 103 water units per second a pump produces 1200 per second There are 48 heat exchangers 48 * 103 = 4944 Unfortunately 4 pumps is only 4800, so you do need 5 and keep in mind fluid dynamics here as well because too many pipes will make you not get enough water.
4:30 _"one fuel cell for __2:00__ minutes"_ ? shouldn't that be *"one fuel cell for 200 seconds"* (3:20 minutes) ? or did they nerf it recently ? 20:00 thus you also wouldn't need 30 fuel per hour, but only 3600/200 = 18 fuel cells, being able to feed almost twice the number of reactors with your produced 30 cells/h :-) 22:05 yes, that is possible now, but many sources might tell that it's not possible since at first it was buggy (giving the bonus on all 41 and not only on the one additionally produced) and they disabled prod modules completely until they fixed it properly by inventing some "catalyst" mechanics so that "40 in and 40 out" levels out before(!) calculating the prod bonus for only the 41st item.
Numbers are not his strength. He said that 56 miners produce 1000 Uranium per hour, which is obviously wrong. Uranium mining speed is 0.25/s, so with 56 miners you get 14 Uranium ore per second or about 50k per hour (~60k with 20% mining productivity bonus). The processing takes 10 ore for 1 U238 or U235, so you get ~6k processed Uranium per hour or ~8.5k if all machines have 4 level 3 productivity modules (40% productivity bonus). Now take 0.7% of this as the U235 yield and you get 59.3 per hour or just about 1 per minute - he said you get 8.5 per hour... The fuel making converts 1 U235 into 10 fuel cells, which gives you 830 fuel cells per hour (assuming 40% productivity bonus). Since a fuel cell can run a reactor for 200s, you can run exactly 46 reactors continuously from 56 mines. So he is off by an order of magnitude and it's actually way less difficult to get nuclear power running without Kovarex.
@@RealNovgorod Just a slight correction to your numbers. A centrifuge is used for processing the uranium ore. I can accommodate only 2 modules, so the productivity improvement will be limited to only 20%. The rest of the numbers look right. Thank you for showing the work. As a mathematician, I appreciate it.
His English isn't just that good, maybe a tip would be creating a script from which he can read. Beside's that we can't complain about someone creating free content for us to use.
I dont like your tutorial, because at the start of the video when you talk about mining the uranium ore, your buildings are already placed, optimized, and you dont explain anything about the process or the different components. Thumbs down on your video.
Thank you! I got back into Factorio this month and made it to the end game, but I've never tried to do anything with uranium. This helped me fully understand the entire process! Also thank you for providing blueprints.
Thank you for making this, It was desperately needed for me and my factory, it needs 200 mw maximum but getting to the materials for this is slowing this factory to a halt.
I just wanna thank you for this Nilaus. I've always got to nuclear and just found a blueprint and stamped it down. I thought nuclear was complex and I just wanted to get to the rest of my factory. It was also exasperated by the amount of complex blueprints available. Crazy blueprints doing very complex Kovarex processes, making it even harder for me to understand how nuclear works.
While I did use your blueprints, the difference is in their simplicity and my understanding. I used the blueprints because it was easier, not because I didn't understand it. I'm yet to set up my spent fuel cells recovery machines, but all in the process is working well and I understand it at every step.
Thanks!
Thank you so much for the blueprint. I did everything by myself so far, however I decided to focus on different things by myslef and use your blueprint to save some time.
AFAIK heat pipes can only permanently lose a fixed amount of energy, unless you really screw up. In the simplest case, you have a reactor and a heat exchanger connected by a single heat pipe. Your reactor will heat up to 1000 C when you turn it on, which will heat the pipe to 999 C, which will in turn heat the heat exchanger to 998 C. If you then turn off the reactor, and start using the steam, the heat exchanger will cool down to 500 C, the pipe will cool down to 501 C, and the reactor will cool down to 502 C. So, on the pipe, you lost (999 C - 501 C) * 1 MJ/C energy permanently, but only once. Subsequent cycles will lose no energy.
The way to really screw up is to put all your reactors and heat exchangers on a single line. A heat pipe can only transmit 1 GW, so it won't cool the reactors enough, and they will waste power.
What I like to do is build "too many" heat exchangers for the amount of reactors, and "too many" turbines for the amount of heat exchangers, and add some storage tanks. If you do it right, the reactor temperature always stays below the maximum. If it does not, you need more tanks, or your control circuits are broken. This way, the reactors, pipes and heat exchangers all act as energy storage, and it's quite a significant amount.
Each reactor stores 5 GJ, each heatpipe stores 1 MJ, and each heat exchanger stores 500 MJ as heat. (Slightly less depending on your layout.) A heat exchanger also stores 19.4 MJ in steam, same as a steam turbine, a pipe stores 9.7 MJ, and of course, a storage tank stores 2.425 GJ. I like to count all these free energy stores by boxing them, then add tanks to have enough storage for 2 rounds of fuel cells, and set up control electronics so that only 2 are inside a reactor at any time. Don't add more fuel if there isn't enough free storage for it. You can get away with less storage if you can estimate the consumption somehow, and take that into account. I didn't do that yet, and I have no good idea how I would.
Then there is also the formidable challenge of getting the water in, and getting the steam out. The latter is especially nasty, because the game will tell you everything is fine, if the steam is blocked, you must not be needing that energy. This is not an exact science, at least until the new fluid mechanincs are implemented. But you can build the entire thing on a landfill island, and have water right where you need it. Then use an unnecessarily large amount of pumps to get the steam out.
@@toddkes5890 You could but you'll need a LOT of trains. A medium size 16 reactor (2.4 GW) power plant would fill a fluid wagon in slightly over a second. It would be 40 tiles long, meaning you could park two 2 + 5 trains on the two sides. They both have to leave, and two new ones have to arrive every 10.1 seconds for this to work. And this is average for full utilization, you'd need more during surge demand. How many trains this needs depends on the distances.
You also have to consider the time delay. If you have steam turbines connected directly to the steam tanks, and power lines running to your outpost, the plant can respond pretty much instantly to power spikes. You will need some storage locally to smooth these out and give the trains a chance to react.
But maybe you'll end up with a smaller plant, all things considered. There is a lot of storage at the outpost stations and in the trains themselves, and you only have to stop the reactors if all of that is getting full. (Assuming your train logic knows to "push" steam even if an outpost doesn't really need it yet.)
@@toddkes5890 As long as train delivery does not become a bottleneck, this will work. But that should not be a problem for 6 reactors. I'm not so sure about larger ones.
Also consider you will necessarily have some storage tanks on the receiving end, and a fluid wagon is a storage tank on wheels. So you could get away with building less than 80. Keeping track of those amounts can get tricky though, especially if you don't have a global circuit network.
Love how you yeeted that train at 1:53
One thing you've missed - steam does not dissipate. You can store steam in tanks like any other liquid resource. Putting tanks in the steam system as buffers works well.
I'm excited for this to become a master class video as well :)
Holy crap! Is Factorio the greatest videogame ever made?
I guess I am doing something right, as I am getting 803MW of power. I have the 2x3 reactors with 80 heat exchangers and 138 turbines. The problem I had is getting the water to flow correctly.I had the ratios right but I had to split up the turbines so each line of pipes goes to a certain number. 8 exchangers -> 17 turbines; roughly. Though my design is not all neat and compact. I used to use pumps to get the water to flow at a decent rate. Even though I have a lake nearby, sometimes water isn't as easy to come by; so you can bring it in by train or have robots move packaged water and that is a whole another setup to get right.
thank you for pronouncing nuclear correctly, I can't believe I have to say that lol
@ Nilaus Try Conecti the the wagon pump after the water pump then the pipe and then check the steam levels you get basically it pushes true more water to make more steam in one heat exchange you get around double the output in power
This is genius man thanks a lot for this explanation. I diden't really understand how nuclear energy worked so thanks a lot
Suggestion for a Tutorial: (avid followers know it already) but your red/green starter base with blueprint would be a sweet starter if you made it into a short tutorial - although its in the start of your vanilla series
1:54 i laughed way too hard when you yeeted out of that train
Me too :DD
so the centrifuge has a build option that has the same output as the input and with production modules now has a higher output.
INFINITE POWER! why would this option not be the first thing you build with nuclear to support the nuclear power plant. also thank you i spent an hr trying to figure this out. had not realized i research nuclear power was just mindlessly researching while building.
One thing I ALWAYS do is building auxiliary power network (solid fuel powered, I float in this crap bu this point) dedicated to making more uranium (Kovarex is cheap enough to get), then expand to about 4 Centrifuges (with maxed out speed modules) for good stuff.
I personally use slightly different design with "buffer" steam tanks and some extra piping thrown in for good measure (pipe throughput actually matter here if you botch design), basically one reactor + L-shape boilers and tanks where you have turbines. the reason for this is I can use tanks, pumps and circuit network to control fuel inserters (I rarely get tho the point when I actually need to run whole setup constantly.
Always informative, and enjoyable. I've been working on kovarex enrichment, seeing if I can't make something good. My setup works (only one quirk), but it seems slower that your demo here. Dang it Nilaus, why you always making me think?!?!
Nilaus, you should cover fuel saving by using storage tanks to store unused steam. Otherwise a good tutorial. :)
I personally don't like steam storage. It is heavy on the performance and as I explain the Uranium 235 is never a concern once you get started
Thats for this design Nilaus.
Firstly, I don't actually play Factorio, I just love watching your streams and seeing how you do things.
Saying that, I have no idea whether this idea would work or not (or even if it would be efficient), but would it be possible to put the storage tank between the heat exchanger and the steam turbines then set up some sort of logic circuit so when the storage tanks drop to a certain level the reactor gets fed another uranium? If that would work then wouldn't the steam turbines connected to the tank run at full capacity?
Love your videos, especially the 4hr streams you've switched over to your Nilaus.tv channel. Keep em coming :D
I have my input inserted set to only input 1 fuel cell, when it detects a pulse from the output insteryers removing a spent fuel cell. The output inverters will only remove a spent fuel cell when my steam tank has
So the power plant is always running, no matter if you need the power or not?
Could you build the 6-nuclear plant first, but then remove 2 power plants, so you can build those later when needed?
I have 2 nuclear reactors producing way more than they should according the the ratios described by the wiki site. I have two nuclear reactors touching on one side (3 connections) with heat pipes running to 38 heat exchangers and 75 steam turbines. This all produces 437 MWs! The wiki said max for 2 reactors should be: 2 reactors for 16 heat exchangers and 28 turbines for a max power total of 160 MWs. Both my reactors temperatures are stable not decreasing at 800 C and the coolest heat exchanger is at 601 C all stable not decreasing. What am I missing here?
It's 160 turbines in 2x3 scheme, not 168
Whoa! How come I missed the notification!! Thanks for this tutorial Nilaus! After some tinkering my base is Nilaus Powered!
Don't you need electrical poles to connect to all the steam turbines?
Helpful!
Good, now I know how a Nuclear Reactor works, now I don't need you.
Thanks you for this video indeed!
You actualy need 5 pums for 4 reactors
Yep and since he has more turbines it's even more important to keep them saturated with water.
heat exchanger uses 103 water units per second a pump produces 1200 per second
There are 48 heat exchangers
48 * 103 = 4944
Unfortunately 4 pumps is only 4800, so you do need 5 and keep in mind fluid dynamics here as well because too many pipes will make you not get enough water.
what am i going to do with all that uranium??? two words... nuclear missiles...
Yaaaasssss! I needed this Badly!
If you use this as your main power source for a megabase, your PC will double as a heater.
If you're making a megabase, you're probably not looking for nuclear power tutorials :)
@innominata True.
shame the blueprint is now out of date comes up with unkownversion("N")
That sucks :( I do have other Nuclear blueprints from more recent series if this one doesn't work (though that does surprise me).
4:30 _"one fuel cell for __2:00__ minutes"_ ? shouldn't that be *"one fuel cell for 200 seconds"* (3:20 minutes) ? or did they nerf it recently ?
20:00 thus you also wouldn't need 30 fuel per hour, but only 3600/200 = 18 fuel cells, being able to feed almost twice the number of reactors with your produced 30 cells/h :-)
22:05 yes, that is possible now, but many sources might tell that it's not possible since at first it was buggy (giving the bonus on all 41 and not only on the one additionally produced) and they disabled prod modules completely until they fixed it properly by inventing some "catalyst" mechanics so that "40 in and 40 out" levels out before(!) calculating the prod bonus for only the 41st item.
Numbers are not his strength. He said that 56 miners produce 1000 Uranium per hour, which is obviously wrong. Uranium mining speed is 0.25/s, so with 56 miners you get 14 Uranium ore per second or about 50k per hour (~60k with 20% mining productivity bonus). The processing takes 10 ore for 1 U238 or U235, so you get ~6k processed Uranium per hour or ~8.5k if all machines have 4 level 3 productivity modules (40% productivity bonus). Now take 0.7% of this as the U235 yield and you get 59.3 per hour or just about 1 per minute - he said you get 8.5 per hour...
The fuel making converts 1 U235 into 10 fuel cells, which gives you 830 fuel cells per hour (assuming 40% productivity bonus). Since a fuel cell can run a reactor for 200s, you can run exactly 46 reactors continuously from 56 mines. So he is off by an order of magnitude and it's actually way less difficult to get nuclear power running without Kovarex.
@@RealNovgorod Just a slight correction to your numbers. A centrifuge is used for processing the uranium ore. I can accommodate only 2 modules, so the productivity improvement will be limited to only 20%. The rest of the numbers look right. Thank you for showing the work. As a mathematician, I appreciate it.
@@michelguenette8998 Correct! Just wanted to see if anyone paid attention :D..
@@RealNovgorod Yep he got the amount of pumps required wrong as well lol
Stop interrupting yourself mid sentence, it's very confusing to follow what you're saying.
His English isn't just that good, maybe a tip would be creating a script from which he can read.
Beside's that we can't complain about someone creating free content for us to use.
There are so many factual mistakes and poor practices in this video. Do NOT use it as a guide.
I dont like your tutorial, because at the start of the video when you talk about mining the uranium ore, your buildings are already placed, optimized, and you dont explain anything about the process or the different components. Thumbs down on your video.