Perfect Nuclear Cloverleaf v3, Modular 1-4 cores book : 40-480MW, All the bells and whistles (2024)

Target
design the perfect power plant in several points of view - reliability, efficiency, easy to use, build expense, UPS and the design beauty.
Design incudes documentation of thermal balance, combinators and build expense. You might check why, or how it works, possibly find an improvement.
The blueprint book starts from 1 core power plant which could be upgraded on the same spot up to 4 cores. Blueprint design reserves the space in advance so you can start small then scale up later.
The blueprint book suits for early game by cheap start, also suits late game, as it fits into Megabase city block design(More on Nilaus's Youtube ).

The Perfect CloverLeaf book
contains 4 variants to choose from 40 / 160 / 280 / 480 MW . It is designed to be built on top of each other. When more power is needed, press Shift key and place the bigger one over an old.

It is belt based, but blueprint comes with a robo-attachment so its ready to go for bots. ( or just delete those two boxes on right top edge of blueprint and attach proper belt.)
It is friendly for pocket roboport build, so there is enough of space to let you walk inside.
It is saved with landfill, just for case.
It is compact square 56x57 = 3192 tiles
Power density is 480 MW/3192Tiles=150,4kW/tile of sustainable output

Water supply
It uses 6 ( 2x3 ) incoming water pipes from one (left) side. Each water-tube can consist up-to 200 pipe_units ( pipe_to_ground piece gives lenght up to ( (200pipes / 2 ) * 11One_section_lenght =1100 tiles ) to achieve required minimal flow per second. Make sure you dont use more pipe pieces than 200 per tube, otherwise fluid friction would limit water flow! Distance 1100 tiles to water source allows you to build plant almost anywhere. Simply attach 6 shore-pumps without additional pumping!

Perfect Activation
It autostarts. Wait till morning or until charge clock counts 200 seconds (upper right combinator area).

Perfect power output
83 turbines are producing dead straight line of 480MW in sustainable output. There is no power drop when new cell is inserted, because the cold interval is reduced to ~1 tick (usual game performance is 60 ticks per second).

Lossless & Brownout prevention
Factorio CheatSheet says that 4 cores loss-less need 40 steam tanks. There is an inconspicuous note down-there saying : "not including heat stored in the reactor or pipes (both heat and steam). "
That note means, you actually need 2 ( y e s, t w o ) steam tanks.

Now, let's keep a minute of silence for design abominations who fallowed false path of Factorio CheatSheet .
We see ( -1,5 ) steam storages are missing to reach lossless balance. So add 2 steam storages is enough to achieve a lossless plant.

Fluid pump keeps turbines under pressure
Each turbine section, each leaf of the four-clover, is fed by a pump. It is for reasons:
1. turbines are under pressure so they produce 100% power to the last moment, up to the last unit of steam. There is no fade out, fade in time because of low steam level i.e. helps suppressing brownout when restarting power-plant.
2. pump allows fluid flow in one way, but no back. It means, production is separated from consumption, so no back waves and reverse waves in tubes to count i.e. UPS friendly.
3. pumps are controlled by the same signal as power-plant main switch, so they are pumping only when plant is ON i.e. UPS friendly.

Two power grids feature
when you get out of power (for some reason), you can chicken out and eventually re-start a power plant manually feeding fuel cells by hand. However, when design requires electric powered pumps to start the electric power-plant, it turns into classic Catch-22 situation.

I used three solar panels and two accumulators (upper left corner) which is enough. If you are heading for an achievement "No_solar", feel free to replace it with a burner boiler and one steam engine.

Combinators
There are three circuitry

Bonus build Fuel cell (re)processing
a compact fuel cell (re)processing facility. It turns on itself only when needed and (re)produce as much fuel cells as needed. Fun to watch.

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The Perfect Clover Leaf book
Because of size, blueprint is added as attachment

1. download the text file
2. open in notepad, ctrl+A, ctrl+C
3. switch to game, press import blueprint button, ctrl+V, press OK
4. the power plant book is available in your library
You found an issue, improvement or just want say it works for you, let me know.
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Edit: 2.12.2021
Latest Update: Version 3 released.
- better understanding of liquid flows allowed me reduce number of Steam storage tanks from 8 to 4, ( while all the features are unharmed)
- added a lamp to each tank showing low steam status
- one turbine removed (84 to 83) to reduce overspend steam. This reduce chance of core overheating paradox from highly unlikely to impossible