It’s there for the mega factory builders.

Well, I didn't bother. Just got my Golden Nut and I only needed a single 900 crude > 3600 Rocket Fuel setup.

Didn't even use the entire fuel, only 2500 fuel per minute because I had more power than I needed and didn't bother building the remaining Fuel Generators. 10 fully overclocked and Somerslooped Particle Accelerators spitting out 25 Nuclear Pasta per minute was enough. My goal was 40 Pasta per minute but I just didn't get there before I got enough coupons (entire setup is there, just had to get the obnoxious amount of copper powder). I do appreciate how well they worked out the proportions. One Pure Node is enough to spit out 2.5 belts of Pure Copper Ingots which is enough for 500 Copper Powder and that's exactly what 2 Particle Accelerators need.

Originally posted by Ashe:

With how Turbo > Rocket > Ionized Fuel is, why would anyone bother with Nuclear? It feels like you jump through 50 more hoops to get a small chunk of what you'd get from a few crude deposits.

To be honest I fully agree. After avoiding nuclear in early access I fully intended to make it my main power source in 1.0. After doing a regular nuclear cycle up to plutonium rods I thought I had something good.

Then I redid my turbo fuel plant to rocket fuel, and I was like - man all that time I wasted with nuclear, and I still have plenty of oil sources that I don't even use...

rocket fuel gives so much power with almost no hassle, while nuclear power has hassle built into it at almost every step. And after going through all the work I still have plutonium waste that I have to store and can't use for anything, it's ridiculous and feels like a lot of work with little reward.

Maybe mods will tune it a bit, make all waste either recyclable or sink-able, or make it much more powerful (like 2x bare minimum). Until that I will not touch it anymore.

I'm building Nuclear just for the challenge, I've had the game since release on Epic, and never gone past regular Fuel before 1.0 (stopped playing for quite a while waiting for 1.0).

So for 1.0 I've got Coal, Fuel and Turbo Fuel, and have just built 10 nuclear power plants, plus a factory to produce the fuel for these 10, although I've only turned on 4 of them so far, as power requirements need them, mainly just to keep the nuclear waste output lower (I'm storing this off the West coast in a big cube of industrial storage).

I'm currently designing a Plutonium factory, to consume the uranium waste. Although I've only just unlocked this.

I suspect with the complexity of Nuclear, this is likely the last time I'll do this, as I'm not a mega base builder, so I have plenty of unused oil around the map. I just wanted to give it a go.

Originally posted by Dailao:

To be honest I fully agree. After avoiding nuclear in early access I fully intended to make it my main power source in 1.0. After doing a regular nuclear cycle up to plutonium rods I thought I had something good.

Then I redid my turbo fuel plant to rocket fuel, and I was like - man all that time I wasted with nuclear, and I still have plenty of oil sources that I don't even use...

This was what made me make the post. I did exactly that. Doing up to the Plutonium was a chore but I then realised that even after making the rods I've just made another bunch of nuclear waste to deal with and hard considered just sinking the rods and calling it a day LOL.

Time building a complicated setup is never wasted. I haven’t reached nuclear in version 1.0 yet, but I have fond memories of nuclear plants in earlier versions.

Also, plutonium waste is no longer permanent. You don’t need a mod to make it recyclable. There’s a plutonium waste -> ficsonium -> ficsonium fuel rod process in tier 9 now. Reports are that it’s not a huge source of energy, despite producing fuel rods. It’s mainly an energy-positive way of disposing of plutonium waste.

Originally posted by Ashe:

Originally posted by Dailao:

To be honest I fully agree. After avoiding nuclear in early access I fully intended to make it my main power source in 1.0. After doing a regular nuclear cycle up to plutonium rods I thought I had something good.

Then I redid my turbo fuel plant to rocket fuel, and I was like - man all that time I wasted with nuclear, and I still have plenty of oil sources that I don't even use...

This was what made me make the post. I did exactly that. Doing up to the Plutonium was a chore but I then realised that even after making the rods I've just made another bunch of nuclear waste to deal with and hard considered just sinking the rods and calling it a day LOL.

I guess what got me interested this time was the changes to plutonium waste.

i.e. That you can now go from Uranium waste to Plutonium fuel (as per before 1.0), then Plutonium waste into Ficsonium fuel, which produces no waste. So you are producing power at 3 stages, and have no waste at the end to get rid of!

That seemed really cool to me, but boy is it complex!

Edit: Typo

Originally posted by gussmed:

Time building a complicated setup is never wasted. I haven’t reached nuclear in version 1.0 yet, but I have fond memories of nuclear plants in earlier versions.

Also, plutonium waste is no longer permanent. You don’t need a mod to make it recyclable. There’s a plutonium waste -> ficsonium -> ficsonium fuel rod process in tier 9 now. Reports are that it’s not a huge source of energy, despite producing fuel rods. It’s mainly an energy-positive way of disposing of plutonium waste.

I think I read that it's actually energy-negative. It costs more to make the new rods than you get from them. It's clean, though, which is what people wanted.

Nothing comes close to nuclear in terms of power production. Nothing. It's the absolute best bang for your buck in terms of efficiency, resource management and saving time.


One pure uranium node with a mk3 miner at 100% can support 6 power plants producing 15000MW / 15GW. Now overclock it to 250% and it's making 45GW. Now throw in Somerloops to double that and it's almost 100GW of power enough for most players power demand from something that takes ~2 hours to properly set up rather than setting up dozens of coal or gas plants around the map and burning through 10x the Somerloops or resources. Don't forget you need oil for rubber and plastic while coal is used for steel.... uranium is pretty much used solely for power generation.

So yeah it's not even a competition.

Originally posted by Swaggaccino:

Nothing comes close to nuclear in terms of power production. Nothing. It's the absolute best bang for your buck in terms of efficiency, resource management and saving time.


One pure uranium node with a mk3 miner at 100% can support 6 power plants producing 15000MW / 15GW. Now overclock it to 250% and it's making 45GW. Now throw in Somerloops to double that and it's almost 100GW of power enough for most players power demand from something that takes ~2 hours to properly set up rather than setting up dozens of coal or gas plants around the map and burning through 10x the Somerloops or resources. Don't forget you need oil for rubber and plastic while coal is used for steel.... uranium is pretty much used solely for power generation.

So yeah it's not even a competition.

that's a whole bunch of nonsense

Originally posted by Swaggaccino:

Nothing comes close to nuclear in terms of power production. Nothing. It's the absolute best bang for your buck in terms of efficiency, resource management and saving time.


One pure uranium node with a mk3 miner at 100% can support 6 power plants producing 15000MW / 15GW. Now overclock it to 250% and it's making 45GW. Now throw in Somerloops to double that and it's almost 100GW of power enough for most players power demand from something that takes ~2 hours to properly set up rather than setting up dozens of coal or gas plants around the map and burning through 10x the Somerloops or resources. Don't forget you need oil for rubber and plastic while coal is used for steel.... uranium is pretty much used solely for power generation.

So yeah it's not even a competition.

It did not take me much longer to build my setup of rocket fuel driven generators, which use only two oil nodes OC'ed to 270 output, leaving a lot of oil for plastic and rubber production. This gives me 120GW (plus alien bonus) and uses exactly 0 Loops. Granted, I spent 600 powershards so I do not have to build hundreds of generators, but that is kind of optional.

I also never got nuclear during early access. I've just built my first nuke plant and waste processing and no more! Too much pain in the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ automated nuclear power is way to much pain than it's worth. The power is surely nice but I don't want to deal with that any more.

And I dislike the radiation screen effect and the constant ticking of the Geiger counter (had to turn sound off). On top of that there is that old bug (that never got fixed!) that makes radiation damage stick if you accidentally sort your inventory while there is something radioactive in there and you have to reload the game. Annoying AF.

Originally posted by Schobbob:

that's a whole bunch of nonsense

Should be easy to debunk then. How many coal plants does it take to produce 90GW? And how many resources of coal itself? How many factories around the map or miles of conveyor belts delivering the coal? The answer is a lot. I tried doing the same thing and realized how ridiculous it was before investing everything in nuclear and it paid off big time.

Originally posted by Kryten:

Granted, I spent 600 powershards

LOL. 600 power shards vs only ~15 powershards for nuclear required (plants + miner). Do you not get what a colossal waste of resources that is? Plus the time you wasted finding those slugs and converting them into shards plus balancing the flow rates of pipes in your refineries? Exactly why I switched everything over to nuclear.

Heh.. I get most of my slugs from doggo ;) but 600? dang. I finally reach 100+ (160 give or take)

Originally posted by Swaggaccino:

Nothing comes close to nuclear in terms of power production. Nothing. It's the absolute best bang for your buck in terms of efficiency, resource management and saving time.


One pure uranium node with a mk3 miner at 100% can support 6 power plants producing 15000MW / 15GW. Now overclock it to 250% and it's making 45GW. Now throw in Somerloops to double that and it's almost 100GW of power enough for most players power demand from something that takes ~2 hours to properly set up rather than setting up dozens of coal or gas plants around the map and burning through 10x the Somerloops or resources. Don't forget you need oil for rubber and plastic while coal is used for steel.... uranium is pretty much used solely for power generation.

So yeah it's not even a competition.

See that's not how it felt doing it.

It's Encased which is concrete and acid + need to deal with acid byproduct

Then Rod which requires Electromagnetic Control Rods set up and either encased beams or crystal oscillators.

Then you need to set up water for each plant, requiring at least one water extractor per (with 2 shards).

Now you need to deal with the waste. If you're not going to dump then you're going to require Nitric Acid for either option.

If you want to do Plutonium you're now adding aluminium to the equation for either Heat Sinks or Pressure Conversion Cubes and Steel Beams.

On paper it's a quick setup. But the preamble is what killed the experience for me. I was pulling practically every single resource on the menu for one project.