I'm not a nuclear engineer but as I understand it, there are control rods which can be raised and lowered to different degrees, but this mod only has full on/off with a timer. As I understand it, totally inserting the control rods 100% is not the same as SCRAMing the reactor.

So I think there ought to be 3 signals

"start" - begins the reaction, requiring electricity
"scram" - end the reaction, requires the cooling tower
"control rods" - let you better balance the reactor WITHOUT shutting it down and wasting fuel.

If you really wanted to get crazy you could break up the nuclear reactor into 2 components- a pile and a rod-inserter. It would be rad if you had a rod-inserter that connected to the nuclear-pile, that can push/pull graphite control rods. Of course, these rods would be controlled by signals and it gives the opportunity to create a whole new ingredient and entities.

I think I understand what you mean. The current logic will mostly remain, however we're going to introduce another tier which will have control characteristics close to what you describe. Although this part is still in development, and considered as future plans.

Regards,

-max23344

Is this documented somewhere? I'm definitely interested in your future plans. I have some of my own ideas: https://github.com/adamwong246/chernobyl

Hmm i see. Actually the RBMK reactors function in a different way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK is a good entry point. At the same time there is a clone https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RealisticReactorsRevived which roughly does what you describe. I think we can talk on discord if you are interested in future development here. Contact me via max2344#2539 thou we're mid of 3.0 finalization currently.

Regards,

-max2344

I would like to renew development talks about this, the ideas displayed here are great

Well, stepping away for a while, I come back with some new ideas for a more complex reactor... not necessarily a more "realistic" one, but a factorio toy thats more fun than the vanilla reactor.

The Easy Parts

1) The reactor should accrue damage when it operating above the safe temperature. In Vanilla, there's no consequence to running the reactor full-tilt, other than the fuel cost.
2) The Reactor should emit radiation that's harmful to the character, making it imperative that you use your remote tools to work around the reactor. This challenges the player to NOT do everything manually.

The Hard Part

The reactor should eat both fuel cells and control rods and, rather than signals to control the reaction, the reaction is controlled by, literally, the number of control rods in the machine. To start the reactor at full tilt, you put a cell in as fuel but you must also remove any control rods. The fewer the rods, the faster the machine heats up. Add some control rods and the temperature slows. Remove some more and the temperature drops. You can try to balance the perfect number of control rods to get the best temperature but the reaction is a function of its current temperature and the current number of control rods, and control rods themselves are used up a non-linear rate, itself a function of the reaction. So it's imperative that you use temperature signals and logical controls to make a feedback system that "balances" the right number of control rods by adding, and removing, control rods.

Under this system, you might implement an auto-SCRAM yourself by building a mechanism that fills the reactor's inputbox with 100 control rods and removes all fuel cells if the temperature exceeds a critical threshold.

TL;DR
1) the reactor should force you to work "remotely" by making radiation a hazard.
2) the reactor should have a range of working temperatures, with a complex function of efficiency and speed, dependent on the actual number of control rods present.
3) The player is forced to build in-game feedback systems, rather than the functionality delivered as part of the mod.
3) the consequence of mis-managing a reactor should be severe and hilariously explosive

I was actually thinking about a feature like this years ago, but I never got to the point of implementing it.

First of all I think controlling the rods other than by signal would be difficult from a technical point of view. For example adding another consumable slot for the rods like described in the post before is a nice idea, but it would be a hell of an effort to program.

The main reason why I never implemented this is because I think mostly the reactor would run at 100% anyway all the time. But the overclocking-feature described above never occured to me, I think that could be a nice addendum. When you are able to get additional power by overclocking while emitting radiation and maybe damaging the reactor - I think that could work in-game.
The only thing I'm not sure about atm is the interaction or dependancy between control rod level and cooling the reactor via ECCS. Lowering the rods should probably having a more mid- or long-term effect, it should not be an alternative to ECCS. No idea how that could work in-game though...

I'm just writing my ideas here as a user, the decision of how to implement this is totally up to dodo.the.last and max2344 - they do all the work nowadays :)

One thing that keeps me from adopting this mod IS the ECCS- I believe the pre-made functionality of a signal is actually an anti-feature that robs the player of a valuable use of sensors and signals. It also confuses my understanding of heat-as-fluid, because to my mind the real task is 1) stopping the reaction and 2) shunting away dangerous excess fluid-heat, not "hot water". But most importantly, it's just funny that you must build your own safety systems, which may or may not collapse right when you need them. Also, signals and heat-fluid are tragically underused.

But it also points to a fundamental aspect of the game- nothing ever runs too much. It appears to me the designers have explicitly designed a system where no machine can ever be said to "go too fast", only "at an inefficient speed". And that's the fundamental loop of the game- let the machine run until a supply line starts to run out. You fix that and another appears, etc etc. But machines never overload and break, they only get clogged and stop. So your machine only ever goes forward. The only thing that can ruin your stuff is enemies and your own weapons. It appears to me that a main tenet of the game is: your factory can't really hurt itself.

Of course, this leads me to try to implement such ideas in mods and after pondering it for a long time, I think I might have a solution. I've been working on a mod where your machines will be damaged of the contents are full. And this applies to all machines but in this case, let's just focus on the reactor and the heat pipes. Under this mod, if the reactor can't push its contents as heat, then it's literally emitted as harmful radiation. And if the heat-pipes can't move THEIR contents, they'll emit the excess as literal explosions. How do you solve this? This mod provides a custom Cooler but there's no reason another entity can't be made that consumes heat and water. I'm pretty sure there are mods for signal-switchable heat pipes and water pumps.

My point is that with RealisticReactors, the reactor now eats water and emits hot water on a signal. I think rather, 1) the reactor ought to only produce heat but it's damaged by being "full" and 2) the ECCS ought be implemented by shunting away fluid-heat, not a signal that switches the mode of the reactor.

Nuclear Engineer's thoughts:

I prefer the idea of using a signal for the control rods to well.. control the rate of power change. I checked out the Revival clone and it nails it pretty much on the head. Reactors don't physically remove control rods from the plant/pile to a separate area, just moved slightly up/down out of the active area of the fuel/core and are not frequently replaced (unless you're breeding Co-60, but that's a Canadian exception to the rule) so they don't really need to be here either, especially since there isn't really a "maintenance" concept in game (thankfully).

On the topic of overclocking: I'm not sure why we would need that here for power generation, as the other power sources don't have this function so it appears to be out of place (also, one does not simply operate fuel above its power rating - that's how you get fuel failures and radioactivity release!)

@max/Igno if the offer still stands to discuss this on Discord, let me know.

Cheers!

The number of rods, as I understand it, was implemented through the neighborhood bonus. This is approximately how the base reactors are now kept from idle operation, their number is regulated depending on consumption.
Remembering the first attempts to make a simulation of a nuclear reactor, there were ideas with modular buildings.
And you can try to return to more reasonably small models. Make them less powerful, but play around with the bonus from the neighborhood.

As for the temperature range. Hasn't this already been implemented in Realistic Reactors? In the same place, there seemed to be even formulas for different types of fuel in which, with increasing temperature, the efficiency first increased and then fell. Ideally, I want to come up with a system that would itself analyze the most favorable temperature (probably something like a neural network). If some penalties and heat loss are implemented depending on the operating mode of the reactor, this would be more relevant.

Rod control is needed. Only for this I do not return from the Revived version. There, not only do the rods do not react immediately, but also the energy generation itself has even greater inertia. However, thanks to them, you can easily keep the temperature at a given level and at the same time there is a risk of an uncontrolled reaction in the event of a sharp decrease in consumption. But without them, I probably returned to the scheme of stopping the supply of fuel when filling a certain energy buffer, as with basic reactors. Then, for realism, I propose the option of reducing the power from the remaining fuel, (I don’t know if you can pull out this variable), at least some interest will then appear in the balance of the number of active reactors.

Control rods could also just reduce the production of heat for the reactor; both for the heat pipes and core. Thus, while effective at reducing heat buildup, they would not actually cool the reactor down, just prevent MORE heat from being created, thereby preserving the necessity of ECCS.

In addition to this, reactor control rods would not change the consumption rate of fuel cells whatsoever; i.e. any heat absorbed by the control rods is effectively wasted.

There's plenty of ideas here to choose from. Can we get an official yes or no on these?
Bump.