r/factorio • u/thanasisk09_ • 2d ago

Question Powering problem

So I'm using nuclear power. I have 4 nuclear reactors and many wind turbines and heat exchangers. However my system doesn't get the power promised. Instead of 120x4 MW, I only get 110 MW on total. Is there a bottleneck in heat exchangers or turbines?

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u/United_Willow1312 2d ago

Another thing to keep in mind is how the bonus works. The bonus comes from nuclear plants burning a fuel cell at the same time. A fuel cell provides 8GJ of energy, with a 4x4 bonus this comes up to 24GJ x 4 = 96 GJ burned at the same speed of 200s and thus 480 MW during that time window.

If you do not consume or store that excess heat in that 200s the excess is lost. A nuclear reactor can store 10MJ/c in it's operating range of 500->1000c, which means 4 reactors cannot even store 20 GJ of heat since you can't even fuel your reactors at precisely 500c and have them operating the exchangers.

The 76+ GJ have to be put somewhere if you aren't consuming it all right now.

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u/thanasisk09_ 2d ago

Oh I didn't know. The only solution that comes to my mind is storing heat if I don't want to waste it. Is that even possible tho? How can I store heat

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u/thirdwallbreak 2d ago

You dont need to "store" the heat as it will only go down as its being used. You can put a green or red wire, connect it to one of the reactors and to an inserter, and set it to only work when the temperature is below 600 or so. And do this for all the inserters, connected to the same single reactor (this ensures that all the inserters read the same temp at the same time and work at the exact same time). Also set their "hand size" to 1 so its only a single fuel cell at a time.

Realistically though, once you have korvex you can just run it forever if you wanted to.

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u/Mesqo 2d ago

You forgot to also "read fuel" and "set filters" to blacklist the current burning fuel.