Suggestion: Advanced Steam Turbines.

[goboking]

I've never built a research reactor, and as things stand, I doubt I ever will build one.  They produce enough heat to power ~10 steam turbines, or 8,500w.  The reactor plus the turbines take up a lot of space.  For contrast, four petroleum generators produces 8,000w and has a smaller footprint.  If nuclear power is meant to be a vanity project, then I suppose it works fine as is.  If not, then an advanced or industrial strength steam turbine that takes in more/hotter steam and produces more power might better incentivize more casual players to build something with little upside and great potential downside.

[meekay]

I finally did it as a challenge/vanity project in my most recent play-through, since I rolled a radioactive ocean planetoid with three water sources on it. It is harder than it looks.  

It took me 5-6 attempts reloading from prior saves to get through one full fuel cycle (180kg enriched uranium) without melting down. I only had four steam turbines on it, should have built at least six. I did find out the hard way that for this application, building your steam turbines out of Aluminum beats anything else because the high specific heat (0.910) keeps the turbines from heating up too fast and shutting down. I also should have built in more shielding, one layer of igneous just doesn't cut it with 12K rads. Nobody died but some dupes glowed in the dark for a while.  Otherwise, if you have Thermium available, you can let it get pretty hot (~700C) as long as you never ever let the water flow get interrupted -- the core temperature is completely independent of how hot the steam room is. Most of the heat also is coming out in the form of nuclear waste, so you can set up a second bank of turbines just to cool that and set your automation to just dump it out into space if things start to get too hot.

[yoakenashi]

While there a few other Rankine cycle working liquids other than water, some are not included in the game, such as ammonia, butane, pentane. While you could stretch the organic Rankine liquids to include in-game hydrocarbons like Natural Gas or maybe event Ethenol, organic Rankine cycles produce less power in reality than water. This is because the cycle is somewhat based on the SHC of the material. For ONI, the only two higher SHC materials than water are nuclear waste and super coolant. Boiling nuclear waste into fallout to run a “nuclear fallout turbine” just doesn’t sound right, but a “super coolant gas turbine” does sound fun, plus it would make sense that the high temperature reactor would align with the higher 436 C boiling point of super coolant.

[ISAWHIM]

Well, nuclear power is actually just steam powered by nuclear reactions, so the ratio is appropriate. However, that being said... None of the power design in the game makes any logic sense.

Hydrogen generators would consume equal oxygen as what the Electrolyzer outputs per hydrogen mass, in the "combustion process", and would output equal water to what an electrolyzer consumed. Respectably, costing more power to separate H2O into Hydrogen and Oxygen, than any generator would ever produce. (H2O) -> (H) + (H) + (O) -> (H2O)

They only pretend to know science, but clearly, some basic science and advanced science knowledge is lacking here. Yes, a hydrogen generators exhaust is water, pure, undrinkable water. (H2O) {which is "pure-water"} vs (H2O)2 {which is drinking "mineral water}} vs (H2O)3 {which is nuclear "heavy water"}.

NOTE: Pure water and heavy-water will kill you if you drink it. Just as pure O2 will kill you if you breath it in, as 100% pure oxygen, without nitrogen and CO2 mixed with it. Only about 21% oxygen is "normal" in air. When CO2 is higher, at night, as plants spew CO2 and absorb O2, you get tired. Too much oxygen and you, oddly, get poisoned by the oxygen.

All generators, including solar, should be making more like 10x to 50x more than they do, and many of the electronic devices should consume more or less, and have EQUAL heat, in relation to the power they consumed. Pure physics fails here, using scientific values to incorrectly portray horribly inaccurate, precise, wrong values defying logic and reality.

I agree though... There should be a better steam generator, which has "pipe-fed steam input", as opposed to room-fed steam collection. A nice 2x4 generator that stands tall and demands piped cooling like a metal refinery.

[pether]

12 hours ago, ISAWHIM said:

They only pretend to know science, but clearly, some basic science and advanced science knowledge is lacking here. Yes, a hydrogen generators exhaust is water, pure, undrinkable water. (H2O) {which is "pure-water"} vs (H2O)2 {which is drinking "mineral water}} vs (H2O)3 {which is nuclear "heavy water"}.

It's not about lacking knowledge, I'm sure they are aware of things needing oxygen to burn and create energy.

It's about game balance - if you needed oxygen to burn hydrogen you created with electrolyzers, nobody could get oxygen from them, and they would be useless building