[spoilers] Is full Nuclear worth it?

[David 001]

As opposed to the previous system of Uranium Power -> Plutonium Rods -> Sink, is the new wasteless chain of Uranium Power -> Plutonium Power -> Fisconium Power worth it?
Because given the insane resorce and power requirements for producing Fisconium (to get rid of ONE Plutonium fuel rod's worth of waste you need an entire nuclear pasta). Did a few numbers, and (With no alternates except for Infused uranium cell and Uranium Fuel Unit) ~300 uranium ultimately comes out to 10 ficsonium fuel rods per minute, which requires an insane amount of production. That's just for a relatively small (175GW) plant. And AT LEAST 21GW of that just goes to powering the thing. Add in any power-hungry alternates, and the project could easily swell to 60GW for a larger plant. So is the cost justified?

[Lucifer]

just somersloop your fisconium son

[tdiz1837]

I would instead sink your plutonium rods, its much better overall and with rocket fuel and fuel generators being buffed.

[Lawn-Mower]

Perhaps it's worth it to say you've done it... You don't really need coupons by that point.

[Khaylain]

Originally posted by Lucifer:

just somersloop your fisconium son

Wouldn't that just give you more Ficsonium for the same input? And isn't Ficsonium fairly low energy in this context? Plutonium Fuel Rods give 1,5 TeraJoule ( 1 500 000 MJ ), while Ficsonium Fuel Rods give "just" 150 GigaJoule ( 150 000 MJ ). That's a tenth. Uranium Fuel Rods give 750 GigaJoule ( 750 000 MJ ), for perspective, though coal is just 300 MJ per unit.

But I would guess that the costs should be worth it just to have an easy way to get rid of it, although you could choose to not use the plutonium power, I guess.

[mansman]

You shouldn't think about the ficsonium loop as power generation. I think that's where everyone is getting hung up. It's a waste disposal process that is at least net power positive and allows access to the plutonium loop (which has significant power production) without the drawback of the waste. It would still be valuable even if the ficsonium end of the cycle was net power negative.

[David 001]

Originally posted by mansman:

You shouldn't think about the ficsonium loop as power generation. I think that's where everyone is getting hung up. It's a waste disposal process that is at least net power positive and allows access to the plutonium loop (which has significant power production) without the drawback of the waste. It would still be valuable even if the ficsonium end of the cycle was net power negative.

That's the problem - the whole point of Ficsonium is to make Plutonium a viable long-term power source. But if it was a net negative, why would players want to process plutonium when they could instead just sink the rods to avoid the massive amount of complexity Ficsonium brings. You'll be investing a massive amount of not only time (building the massive processing site(s)), space/performance, and power, but also a very large proportion of map resources. Uranium isn't that bad, plutonium is a bit expensive, but still reasonable. Ficsonium processing has the requirements of space elevator tiers. That's not even to mention the massive amounts of SAM required to run the setup. Overall, I feel the current ficsonium chain is extremely unbalanced, and thus rarely of any real use.

[mansman]

Sorry, I wasn't very clear. It's just the ficsonium portion of the production chain that would be net negative and not the plutonium part of it. I was separating each part of the chain into their own power +/- calculation. Both uranium power and plutonium power produce large amounts of power currently. The ficsonium production takes a large portion of the power it produces so it's sort of a wash by itself but you still get all the power the plutonium produced.

[Goblin]

Originally posted by Lucifer:

just somersloop your fisconium son

Pretty sure you'd be WAY better off when slooping your singularity cells so you can burn through double the nuclear waste, than if you were to sloop your ficsonium so you can get double the energy from it.

[Acecool]

You could probably belt or train all of your waste to the south-west side of the map. You can go out to those islands now without dying and there isn't anything out there.

[NocheLuz]

I just got the Nitro Rocket Fuel alternate recipe. Which basically turns Fuel into Rocket Fuel directly (skip the Turbo Fuel part). It is also easier to set up and has a little bit better ratio.

My calculation is based on, turning 300 m3 Oil into 400 m3 Heavy Oil Residue. After that using Dilute Fuel, turn 400 m3 Heavy Oil Residue into 800 m3 Fuel. Then using Nitro Rocket Fuel will turn 800 m3 into 1,200 m3 Rocket Fuel.

Rocket Fuel burns at the rate of 4.16 units per minute. So if I have 1,200 Rocket Fuel per minute should support 288.46 Fuel Generators or about 72,000 MW of power.

Just thinking about setting this on a pure oil node already shower me with high enough power without relying on Nuclear power.

[Khaylain]

Originally posted by Goblin:

Originally posted by Lucifer:

just somersloop your fisconium son

Pretty sure you'd be WAY better off when slooping your singularity cells so you can burn through double the nuclear waste, than if you were to sloop your ficsonium so you can get double the energy from it.

Aye, good shout.

[kLuns]

from 300 uranium you get 120GW extra from ficsonium at the cost of 56GW
with somersloop in the ficsonium it can be 160GW but the power demand will be bigger too.

For power that's worth it regular Rocket Fuel with turbo blend fuel and diluted fuel does it better (imo)
1800 oil
1200 sulfur (still over 8,5K left for other insane projects.)
40 iron
1800 water

254,5GW at the cost of a rough 15GW factory

[The_Architect]

I spent some time planning out my factories and landed on slooping ficsite ingot output as an efficient option if you want to do the entire nuclear chain with 100% uranium usage. I tried slooping reanimated SAM first, but caterium ore output became a problem and it needed more somersloops than this plan. Ficsite is the only material that absolutely requires SAM, there's a bottleneck of roughly 37 converters at 100% SAM utilization, and everything else can be made (at great expense) from other goods with less limited resources. The calculator tells me that to use the maximum 224 plutonium waste/min you'll need almost 4500 trigons/min to make the needed 112 ficsonium fuel rods/min. The maximum output of trigons I've been able to find is 6557/min (only slooping the ficsite ingots, you CAN get more but that's probably not necessary), so there's plenty of room to save a few sloops for other bottlenecks elsewhere for more breathing room, like the singularity cells. This was all based on a 100% uptime factory plan though, if that's not your plan then it's much easier.

Is it worth it? If your answer to "Do you like building massive, complex factories?" is yes, then yes.

[kLuns]

Aren't somersloops the most effective in the last process and from there backwards?

[vivan]

Originally posted by kLuns:

Aren't somersloops the most effective in the last process and from there backwards?

Most of the time, but with rare exceptions. When last step uses a lot more machines than previous and only 1 input is very limited doubling that input might be more effective.

E.g. for Ficsite Trigon:
1) 2 constructors: 240 SAM -> 60 Reanimated SAM
2) 1 converter: 60 Reanimated SAM + 120 Aluminum Ingot -> 30 Ficsite Ingot
3) 3 constructors: 30 Ficsite Ingot -> 90 Ficsite Trigon

For doubling output at the same SAM input:
Doubling step 1 requires 2 somersloops and 2x Aluminum Ingots
Doubling step 2 requires 2 somersloops
Doubling step 3 requires 3 somersloops

So the most efficient is doubling step 2, not 3.