Introduction

This blueprint is a 4x nuclear reactor design. It has some uncommon / nice features like :

• buffered steam storage
• steam balancing with pumps
• 558MW peak power for a 'short' time
• walkable up to the reactors
• power shortage immune

Buffered steam storage

The main problem with nuclear power plant is that the fuel is consumed, used or not to power things. For solving this problem, tanks are used to store steam output. We usually find some complex logic for inserting the fuel inside the reactor based on the amount of steam left in the tanks. Doing a sturdy and fail safe design is somewhat difficult. I have seen so many reactor failing because of flaky logic. This design has a very large steam storage capacity: 5 tanks per heat exchanger. The inserter logic is limited to a very basic behaviour based on the steam left in the tanks. When there is only 20K unit left of steam per heat exchanger row, inserters are allowed to feed the reactor for 5 fuel cell. If total power consumption is lower than the rating of the reactor, steam tanks are refilled with steam. Once all fuel cells are burnt, steam tanks empty until the 20K limit.

Steam balancing

Uneven steam consumption usually leads to unpredictable behaviour. Some reactor uses a complex pipe layout to connect all the steam tanks together. Fluid simulation sometime leads to very unpredictable situation. To avoid any problem related to fluid simulation, each heat exchanger has 5 steam storage tanks, a pump, a decider combinator and two steam turbine. The layout is nice and easy to build manually as a side effect. The inner logic of the reactor is inspired by the train loading/unloading balancers. An arithmetic combinator divides the content of all the steam tanks by 12, the number of heat exchangers per reactor. The average is fed to the decider combinator to open/close the pump. If there is more steam in the tanks row than the average, the pump is switched on else it is shut down. All tanks are evenly unloaded. When tanks are unloaded without a balancer, usually, tanks located at the opposite of the reactor ends empty way before the tanks closer to the reactors. It makes fueling the reactor hazardous : the rows close to the reactor are full of steam (that is, loosing power...) while the far away heat exchanger never fully loads. This balanced design is replicated 4 times, one per reactor.

Peak power

Usually a 4x reactor requires 83 steam turbines to fully consume the power budget allowed by the reactors. This design, mostly for symmetry concerns, uses 96 steam turbines for a peak power of 558MW. Combined with the large steam storage, it provides a 'short' burst of power. This is ideal to dampen roboports activity.

Walkable

I hate when a nuclear reactor cannot be visited. This design can be crossed with a straight path.