
Heat exchangers produce nothing when they are below 500☌. They can heat up to 103.09 units/second of water into 500☌ steam. Heat exchangers also require water input, in precisely the way boilers do. The heat input is marked by a flame when you're placing it.įor simple reactor designs, you can connect it directly to your reactor (which produces heat at points also marked with a flame). It works much like the boiler, but instead of burning fuel, you need to connect it to a heat source. The heat exchanger takes heat and uses it to convert water into steam. The reactor needs input of fuel and produces heat that needs to be exported using heat pipes that go to a heat exchanger (unless a heat exchanger is attached to the reactor). A centrifuge requires about 1714 seconds to produce a U-235, so you'll need about one processing centrifuges per reactor. Working backward: A reactor consumes a fuel cell every 200 seconds and each U-235 gives 10 fuel cells, so every U-235 provides 2000 seconds of reactor power. Eventually, you can reprocess them into U-238. Initially, these will simply accumulate in a chest. Once expended, reactors will produce a " used up uranium fuel cell", which will need to be cleared. Since a Watt is a Joule per second, this means the reactor will consume one fuel cell every 200 seconds. This is the first step toward turning it into usable energy.Ī reactor will produce exactly 40 MW of heat energy. Once you've got fuel, you'll need to burn it in a nuclear reactor.
#Factorio nuclear reactor setup full
A full chest of iron probably won't run out before you get bots and replace it with a requester.Įach fuel cell has a nominal energy value of 8 GJ, but it's possible to make them go even farther with reactor neighbor bonuses (more on that later). Tip: It isn't a bad idea to use a chest and just stick a pile of iron in it rather than belting the iron in. You're going to want a big fat stockpile of it when you research kovarex enrichment later on.įuel cells are produced in stacks of 10, and to produce one such stack you need 1 U-235, 19 U-238, and 10 iron plate.


Only convert what you need to fill your reactor.

You won't want to automatically convert all U-235 into fuel. Which is fine because fuel cell creation will very rarely be the bottleneck. You'll probably be using an assembling machine 2, so these will take 13.3 seconds to create as well. Fuelīefore you can burn it in a nuclear reactor, you need to create uranium fuel cells. But early on, make sure your generation rate is sufficiently high, or you have a sufficient reserve, so you don't find yourself without power when you hit an unlucky stretch. In reality, you'll see long stretches with no U-235 and short stretches with lots of them. Which means that over the long term, they work out to about these figures. Regarding averages: Be aware, random is random. However, when you first start out, this will be an important bottleneck. A centrifuge can then be expected to produce U-235 every 1716 seconds. That means you can roughly expect to get a single U-235 in one out of every 1428 ore. Out of every 10k ore you process, you can expect to get, on average:

Every ten ore processed have a chance to become precisely one of these two products. In an un-moduled centrifuge, you can process ten ore every 12 seconds.Ĭentrifuges produce a combination of U-235 (the light green stuff) and U-238 (the dark green stuff). Once you've got raw uranium ore, you'll need to process it into uranium-235 and uranium-238. The miner will produce mixed ore, as usual.
#Factorio nuclear reactor setup Patch
Mixed ores: If a mining drill covers even a single patch of uranium ore, acid must be supplied to the miner or the mining drill will stop running once it encounters the uranium ore. The drills conduct excess acid through themselves, so a row of drills can be supplied by acid from a single side. You also need to supply sulfuric acid to the drill. Unlike every other ore, however, you will need more than just an Electric mining drill. Like every other ore in the game, you can mine it with an Electric mining drill. It tends to form smaller deposits, though, and you may have to search a while to find a good patch. 2.5 Raw resource cost of running a single reactor (late game)įirst steps Technology required: Nuclear power You can mine uranium ore sooner, but you'll need the nuclear power technology to do anything useful with it.
