I took most of a week off from the build to stave off burnout. This weekend I cleared a key milestone, though:

20 Nuclear Power Plants now await their Uranium Fuel Rods.

I completed all of the electrical hookups and water supply machinery this morning as well as getting more of the waste product belting into place. This includes the 3:1 splitting of the Uranium Waste so I can route the correct amounts to the Non-Fissile Uranium production line and the particle accelerators making Plutonium Pellets.

Speaking of splitting belts…

One of the trickier, more hidden challenges of this build will be properly load-balancing the radioactive parts. I don’t want uranium ore, nuclear power rods, or any other “spicy” ingredients in the process to get piled up in the first couple machines of a standard manifold line. Sure, I’ll have my hazmat suit equipped any time I’m doing work on the facility, and if all goes well I won’t need to visit the buildings again once power generation begins. I’ll be safe! The other reason to load-balance, though, is because of the low output (or throughput) of some of the parts.

For instance, the Uranium Fuel Rods will be cranked out at a whopping four items per minute by the time production reaches its intended level. If I ran a typical manifold system to feed twenty power generating machines off of that per-minute output, some of the generators toward the end of the line would only see a couple of Fuel Rods per hour. This is not the way to produce a steady power supply. (Ask me how I know!)

Unfortunately, the same math that works out so nicely for producing the 4/min Uranium Fuel Rods makes a mess of the load balancing. Ideally I’d want to use 1:2 splits through the entire power “island” but 20 generators makes a mess of that. Half of 20 is 10, half of 10 is… 5. Splitters can go 1:3 as well as 1:2 so the game plan is basically to feed each row of 10 from an initial split, then carve each of those into two sets of 5, each of which will get fed by a 1:2 splitter and a 1:3 splitter.

That sentence probably didn’t make much sense, and I don’t know how to make it make more sense unfortunately. But that’s okay! What matters is that I’ve been getting my load-balancing game on for the parts of the process which need that technique, and (fingers crossed) when I light up this factory everything should be smoothly balanced (as much as I can manage, anyway).

I made one clever decision, though: For the first time, I’m supplying fuel rods via a conveyor belt delivered to the center of the (double) row of generators, instead of starting at one end and having to run that belt all the way to the middle to be the “start point” for the load balancing work. Go, me!

So the current slate of tasks is:

1. Finish placing & connecting the fuel and waste belts (and splitters and mergers), which will complete the functional parts of the build for the power generators section.
2. Finish routing conveyor belts between all of the waste recycling production lines.
3. Build out & belt up the manufacturing lines to make the actual Uranium Fuel Rods.
4. ???
5. Profit!

It’ll probably be a while yet before I can light up the factory at the rate I’m going, but this is the sort of big, big project which can overwhelm you if you push too hard. So I take lots of breaks. Hopefully I’ll have the first two tasks on that list knocked out by next week’s post. Wish me luck!