Place and forget. 1x1.5 chunk.
Fast start:
- Starts automatically and runs the first Kovarex centrifuge with exactly 40 U-235.
- Excess U-235 from Uranium or Kovarex is split between producing fuel cells and the additional Kovarex centrifuges. This lets you use reactors much sooner.
Fully automatic:
- Place the blueprint, build, feed Uranium Ore and Iron Plate.
- No manual feeding of centrifuges, no manual placing of centrifuges in order to minimize the time to produce fuel cells.
Inputs and Outputs:
- Uranium Ore input belt
- Iron Plate input belt and requester. Use the the requester instead of belt if you want robot delivery from train to fuel cell assembler.
- U-235 output belt and passive provider
- U-238 output belt and passive provider
- Fuel Cell passive provider, to deliver them to nearby nuclear power plants or to a train.
- Robot trash collection storage chests for U-235, U-238, Fuel Cells.
- Spent Fuel Cell requester chest, to receive spent fuel cells from nearby nuclear power plants or `train.
Roboports pads:
- If you chunk-align this 1x1.5 chunk pad, the yellow concrete roboport pads at the perimeter are at the perfect distance for roboports, along chunk borders
Beacons:
- The blueprint has the beacons positioned but not filled with modules. This is to reflect that initially (as at the time in the map when I designed this blueprint) you probably want to conserve power. At that stage I would even recommend not placing the beacons. You can overlay the blueprint and insert modules later, once you have significant module production and plenty of power.
POWER NOTE:
- As all combinator-based designs, this design might be vulnerable to brownouts. There is an empty area near the Uranium Ore input where you could place a shutdown mechanism for brownouts, but as fuel cells are essential to running reactors I do not recommend it. Instead I recommend using a circuit that shuts down your other factories at various % levels, so that fuel cell production never stops. You can use this design for that: https://factorioprints.com/view/-LOOQbz6NZoOI4hjPCtl
Updates:
2019.04.09: Discovered that this factory strained under some circumstances. For example it wasn't too gracious if there was too little consumption. I first resolved those issues but it looked messy, so I kept the principles but completely restructured it for cleaner flow.