Ratios for Nuclear Power

[xLessia]

Hello :)

does anyone know how the ratio behave for Nuclear power for Steam Turbines, Heat Exchanger, the Power plant itself and Offshore pumps?

[brian_va]

turbines, exchangers and reactor ratios will vary due to neighbor bonuses.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Nuclear_power#Neighbor_bonus

[Ryan]

I think it is easiest to just have an abundance of storage tanks for the steam. Then have a simple trigger than turns your nuclear plant on and off based on the storage tank steam levels. Now you have 0 waste of fuel.

I do trial and error where I add on to it until the nuclear plant does not reach 999 degrees. Once you have it right blueprint it.

[GMC]

A reactor produces 40MW, plus another 40MW for each active neighbouring reactor. So a 2x2 block produces 480MW (4*3*40). A heat exchanger consumes 10 MW. It takes 200J to heat 1 unit of water by 1°C. Fresh water is at 15°C while the steam produced by heat exchangers and consumed by steam turbines is at 500°C, a difference of 485°C, so you need 1 unit of water for each 97kJ, which is roughly 10.3 units per MJ. An offshore pump produces 1200 units of water per second, which is enough for 116.4 MW. A steam turbine consumes 60 units of steam per second, which is 5.82 MW.

IOW, for every 40 MW, you need 4 heat exchangers, 6.873 steam turbines, and 0.344 pumps. For a 2x2 block of reactors, multiply by 3*4=12: 48 heat exchangers, 83 turbines, 5 pumps. For a 2x4 block, multiply by 3*4+4*4=28: 112 heat exchangers, 193 turbines, 10 pumps. In practice, I'd suggest rounding up to 2 pumps per reactor to offset the flow restrictions from all those pipes and to simplify the layout (pumps are cheap).

Also: heat capacity matters if you aren't running close to 100%. A reactor can store 5GJ, a heat exchanger 500MJ, and a section of heat pipe 500 MJ. Each fuel cell produces 8GJ plus the neighbour bonus (so a reactor with two neighbours gets 24GJ from each fuel cell, one with three gets 32GJ). Ideally you want enough total heat capacity to store the total energy of one set of fuel cells (one per reactor). The reactor, heat exchangers and heat pipes won't be able to hold all that, so you'll also want some steam tanks, each of which stores 25*97=2.425 GJ.