water requirements for large nuclear plants are broken

[Gugelugu]

♥♥♥♥ fluid system so the only reasonable way to supply water to large nuclear plants is by placing it directly on top of a lake with offshore pumps directly into the heat exchangers. thank you devs for your awful fluid system that forces me to do this.

also can't even ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ test your setup because there's no way to artificially load the electric grid. more fantastic game design.

[Hurkyl]

If the logistics challenge is too much for you and you find using landfill to be unappealing, you always have the option of building multiple power plants rather than trying to make a giant one.

Beacons are pretty power hungry. You could plop down a large array of them if you want to create a large power draw, and connect it with a power switch to easily toggle it on and off.

[Hurkyl]

There's also the 'electric-energy-interface' debug item you can give to yourself. It should be able to draw power, but either it's currently bugged or I'm not using it correctly. I think there are also mods to more easily provide access to this item, or easier to use items to serve as a power void.

[Gugelugu]

what logistics challenge? placing landfill carefully? very difficult.. it's not a challenge. you can't reasonably calculate the liquid throughput of a system. you can plan around belts, trains, everything else, but fluid system is so utterly pants on head retarded that there's no chance.

I would have to place something like 24k beacons to stress the system fully. why even mention it at that point.

[Chindraba]

Neither statement is true. The overloading is simple: use beacons or radar. If you have the means to build a reactor setup which needs testing you also have the ability to produce those. Using a bunch of radar will reveal more of the map, which might be good or bad for you, but they are cheap to make. Beacons will consume 60% more power than radars while being more expensive to make. You are likely to need more beacons later anyway, so the stockpile left after testing will not be wasted. 84 beacons will overload the power grid for each SRE.

There are many prints with the reactor and steam all built on land and the water is piped from banks of offshore pumps, sometimes even through tanks. Building on a lake is just easier. No trees, rocks and cliffs to remove and no ore patches which will be covered by the plant. The footprint of a multi-core reactor is not exactly small and more or less needs to stay the way it was designed. Building on a lake makes that easier to do while also removing the need for pipes to carry the water to the heat exchangers.

Here's a cute one[www.factorio.school] which can be built right on the shore or have the water piped in. There are plenty to chose from, either to build directly of for inspiration on the myriad ways water can be handled for the reactors.

[Khaylain]

Originally posted by Gugelugu:

what logistics challenge? placing landfill carefully? very difficult.. it's not a challenge. you can't reasonably calculate the liquid throughput of a system. you can plan around belts, trains, everything else, but fluid system is so utterly pants on head retarded that there's no chance.

I would have to place something like 24k beacons to stress the system fully. why even mention it at that point.

You absolutely can (reasonably) calculate the liquid throughput of a system. It's not hard at all, see https://wiki.factorio.com/Fluid_system#Pipelines.

[Chindraba]

Fluid calculations are simple, even if they are not the nice round numbers you're used to.
One steam turbine needs 60 water/sec converted to steam. One offshore pump give 1200 water/sec. Every offshore pump will feed 20 steam turbines.
One steam turbine uses 5.82 MW worth of steam, each heat exchanger creates 10 MW worth of steam. 291 heat exchanges exactly feeds 500 steam turbines.
One reactor makes 40 MW worth of heat, one heat exchanger uses 10MW of heat. One reactor exactly feeds 4 heat exchanges.
As long as you remember to apply the reactor equivalence for neighbor bonuses, there are no other things you need to know to "math it out" perfectly.

[Нагризолич]

From gameplay standpoint it is feasible, although my 60gw reactor meta is to build pumps and then landfill them around, so I could attach them to heat exchangers directly. I've seen setups where water is delivered by train via direct two-way rail, the setup is two water pumps, fluid tank and a pump that is directly connected to train without any pipes (landfilling helps to shape your shore properly). Typically it takes about 1.5 seconds to fill a train tank, so the throughput is pretty high. Alternatively you can build pipelines out of pumps, which effectively have the same effect, although even one bend would slow down your pipe to half of just pumps with no pipes, so plan accordingly. Keep in mind though that such setups are prone to blackout deadlocks, so you might want to build separate solar power grid for water infrastructure.
From realism standpoint it is not really feasible, because all that used up steam is supposed to go somewhere, and it would save energy to use it in water pre-heating recuperator and/or condense steam back to water in a cooling tower (that is an actual purpose of NPPs cooling towers), so that water losses of practically any power plant are minimal, mainly because you don't just put lake muck in your boilers, but rather distilled demineralized water, unless you want them to calcify and break. But then again, factorio isn't a realistic simulator, so gameplay overrides realism wherever neccessary.

[Hurkyl]

Originally posted by Gugelugu:

what logistics challenge?

Delivering water from one place to another.

but fluid system is so utterly pants on head retarded that there's no chance.

You can science it pretty easily, from what I've seen. A failure on your part is not mental deficiency on the dev's part.

Also, I think it's fairly likely that next year, we'll get fluid revamp they had to scrap in order to get version 1.0 released. So, it may not be such a great idea to try and design something that depends too much on the fine details of how the current system operates.

[KatherineFtw]

I mean, why do you think nuclear power plants are built near large bodies and systems of water in the real world? Sounds realistic to me.

[Ferox_Stormdragon]

if your having trouble with nuclear i'd recommend watching these tutorials

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw_NzPuccxk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA21zrqMMq0&t=3s

[knighttemplar1960]

Its better to set your plants on a lake edge so that you don't have to move water with trains. This is the same reason that I build my advanced oil refineries on the edge of a lake. Its easier to move the oil to the water than vice versa.

You can also keep a save file of finished bases that you stopped playing because UPS was starting to drop. Build you blue print there and disconnect all your other power sources to give it a load test. If it works add the blue print to your library.

[Geirfinna Lieselotte]

Perhaps the problem is located between the chair and the keyboard

[Нагризолич]

Originally posted by KatherineFtw:

I mean, why do you think nuclear power plants are built near large bodies and systems of water in the real world? Sounds realistic to me.

Well actually that water is mostly used as coolant for waste steam, and occasionally as kinetic energy accumulator. Only small fraction of that water is prepared and used to resupply water losses from closed system. It's cheaper to use semi-natural body of water than to build huge cooling towers. Not sure about every single NPP in the world, but all of the ones that I know more than their names at least.

[kremlin]

Here, this might help.
https://factoriocheatsheet.com/
Pay close attention to the numbers. You don't want to be using one less pump than you actually need because you cut off the remainder. It's not that hard to figure out.

[Sensemann]

To make an infinie Nuclear Powerplant, you only can plant it in the sea, because otherwise theres no space for the turbines. I stopped at 36 reactors in a row.... it gets kinda unhandy from there. And then you also see the flaws of the fulid system, when the whole thing is under stress, one can really see where Factorio starts to check for steam first XD

But back to topic, it was not very hard to calculate the ratios and the fluid which fits in a pipe, as some people already showed here too.