Oxygen Not Included - Tutorial Bites - Nuclear Power

This tutorial bite for Oxygen Not Included looks at nuclear power and research reactors. I cover how to collect the fuel and two reactor designs.

0:00 - Intro
0:22 - Uranium Ore sources
0:44 - Making Enriched Uranium
0:56 - The Uranium Centrifuge
1:54 - Beetas
2:56 - Standard reactor design
5:14 - Reactor meltdowns
5:58 - Cooling loop
6:28 - Nuclear waste collection & compression for radbolts
7:04 - Starting up the design
7:19 - Standard reactor design one take reference
7:28 - The Coolant Limited Research Reactor (CLRR)
10:08 - CLRR one take references
10:32 - Outro

[AzelTheDemon]

My dude, as someone who routinely loses colonies while trying for all sorts of achievements, your videos are inspirational :)

[Jarmen__Kell]

I love it how it's just a glorified water boiler.
Like real life Nuclear reactors xD

[XiremaXesirin]

A few notes on the CLRR, having built many in survival colonies:

I think it's a mistake to put the aquatuners so far to the extant edges of the steam chamber. Nedigo *had to do it that way* because they were using Waste as the coolant and had to isolate the aquatuners in submerged pools of waste to prevent it from leaking out, but even if I were using Waste as the coolant then I'd probably still prefer to put the aquatuners in the central channel instead, just surrounding them with airflow tiles so Steam can pass by. The reason the aquatuners are prone to overheating is because at the extant edges (especially higher up, where the steam pressure is lower) they heat up steam that's essentially standing still, and a single steam turbine can't soak the heat up fast enough. BUT, if you instead put the aquatuners in or near the center of the steam chamber, heat will get picked up by the steam flowing past, and it better equalizes the temperatures in the chamber without having to use any tricks to redirect water flow.

The pump at the bottom should, ideally, be controlled by two conditions, AND'd together: a Hydro Sensor measuring at least 800kg or higher (I think 500kg is too low), and a temperature sensor measuring 200C or lower. The second part is critical because otherwise, you risk extracting nuclear waste from the steam chamber before it has bled off enough of its heat. I also think that Nedigo way overengineered the mechanism to pull heat from the waste: Aluminum tempshift plates work fine. The design ensures that there will never be an individual tile at or above 400C, so the aluminum is safe from melting. If you're really worried about the possibility of some of the waste flashing into nuclear fallout, you can make the pool two tiles deep for safety, but I've never found it necessary.

I would also err on the side of potentially overpressurizing the steam chamber, rather than underpressurizing. I've had many issues where towards the upper-corners of the steam chamber the steam pressure just peters out. It's actually pretty safe to let the steam pressure towards the bottom of the build be as high as 200-250kg/tile, since that pressure will rapidly drop as you ascend the steam chamber, since all that steam is getting pulled into the turbines. That amount of pressure will usually result in the reactor itself having a steam pressure around 100kg/tile, which is perfectly safe. You definitely don't want the pressure to get too low, or else you'll get problems properly consuming the heat. If you really want to be careful, then aim for pressure where, when idle (i.e. the temperature is too low for the turbines to consume steam) the room equalizes to about 140kg-ish per tile. That might seem dangerously close to the reactor's overpressure limit, but that steam pressure will drop fast once the turbines actually turn on.

Be careful how you route the plumbing for the water that's being sent back to the reactor. Since it only flows at 1kg/second, there's a serious risk that the water will overheat if the insulated pipes are routed through the steam chamber itself. I even had this problem when making the pipes from Ceramic! So make sure as much of the piping as possible is embedded in the insulated tiles so that there's no risk of the water picking up undesirable levels of heat.

[Kellerw]

I would be actually unable to play this game without these videos.

[louishermann]

FINALLY! The first CLRR on YouTube! Thank you so much I have found it nearly impossible to find info on this other than the forum post. I'm trying to design one that will keep the peak heat in a core for petroleum boiler without letting any of the waste flash to fallout.

It's a tough design but I think I have a concept that should work.

[chriscampbell]

Just built this in my base, and after about 100ish cycles the whole system over-pressurized with steam and melted down. As far as I can see the liquid pipes are set up the same. Going to go back in and add a pressure sensor to pull water out to prevent this from happening in the future.

[louishermann]

Some additional info about the CLRR waste flashing mechanics not mentioned in the video.

When the 100kg of hot (>500C) nuclear waste drops out of the reactor it will flash to fallout in the first frame of contact with a tile or liquid and will immediately flash unless falling into a pool of cool nuclear waste.

What's happens is in the first frame of contact the 100kg hot waste will merge with the pool of cool waste, summing their masses and instantly averaging their temperatures.

This temperature average must be lower than the waste's flash point (530 I believe). The way to accomplish this involves having a full tile of cool waste (1000kg) and having it at sufficiently low temperature (somewhere around 450). If these conditions aren't met you get 1100kg of nuclear fallout gumming up your turbines, lowering your power and cooling output, and eventually causing a meltdown.

Obviously in this process your basin needs to be cooled in some capacity before the heat raises enough that that happens.

So my solution was to use a secondary basin of cool waste held behind an airlock that gets filled while the primary basin heats up. When the primary basin gets too hot the airlock door opens and floods the hot primary basin with the cool waste from the secondary basin.

The overflow spills out into a long heat exchanger that powers the turbines, refills the secondary basin, and disposes of the excess.

[kikokiko]

Good quality video, the subtitles are nice and the explanations are clear

[Tiny_Chip]

Thank you! I'm nowhere near this stage in the game yet but I'm sure I can come back for this video.

[Intvictus]

Man just got this game started near a pocket of uranium and I'm starting to think that this game requires more brainpower than I can produce when I get home after work because theres so much that can go wrong

[estherk]

For some reason Youtube unsubscribed me?? I could have sworn I was subbed to your channel before. Thank you for your helpful tutorial bites, they are so great at breaking down the mechanics I haven't been able to wrangle yet. :D

[Rd]

You could also have mentioned Francis John's double-reactor design, but this is still great.

[jasonwstone]

Two aquatuners with poluted water wasn't enough long term - though I also had a bit of pipe over the nuclear waste pool. Though by then there is enough nuclear waste. It is a lot of fiddling to change out the coolant.

[gid]

Still helpful till this day mate thanks!

[kavunpeynir]

First one is the simple light water reactor with safer negative void coefficient, and second, RBMK reactor with a higher energy output and positive void coefficient. I am sure nothing will go wrong :)

[acheronexile]

Gives me interesting feeling idea for a water boiler that uses some radiators to spread heat from a steam room back into a somewhat large hot water tank. Might be useful for modulating the temperature to just under 200 or whatever your target happens to be.

[michaelrichards]

This is really cool, lol I had something similar to your first design on a radioactive planet once, you did it interesting though, corrected a couple of my mistakes

[mickuijldert]

Thanks again for some very high quality content, as usual!

[GMPOFloyd]

I have another problem with this reactor. I've put everything in a vacuum chamber so there's no heat leak and I have added one aquatuner more, but for some reason the cooling loop simply can't manage the heat and starts to slowly heat up. I'm thinking about adding 4th aquatuner, but the addition of the 3rd did not seem to fix the problem. Also, I had to add some automation to the reactor to prevent the whole system to overheat and radiant pipeing to draw heat from the nuclear waste (which anyways goes into other machine I have to further cool it down). I'm talking about the small nuclear plant. It's not a bad design but needs more work to make it function properly, I've been stuck with that for the fast few days, once you start the reactor, it's very difficult to work with the system and I have had to go back to the save from before starting it a few times.

[michaelsotomayor]

I wish you had also referenced the limited fue RR or whatever it's called. I want to control how much uranium is introduced into the system. I guess I can just use a timer sensor on a conveyor shut off?