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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition

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Angle said:
Yeah, US peak oil consumption per capita was back in 1970. Whee. Okay then. :/
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Yeah. A fair portion of the general economic malaise that's been going on in the First World since the Regan era is simply the result of running low on cheap energy inputs.

Going ham on nuclear power, to a degree that dwarfs anything that happened OTL, is important for a variety of reasons, and one of them is simply that having more energy to work with is very good for a society.
 
Can't we develop the CMEA guys and well do even more trade with them ( get our own marshal plan, but its for our Power Block), get their basic resources be it oil or coal and they get advanced goods, and with it try to manage this shortage with building more nuclear power, like i can see a way out of this if we focus more on the CMEA Nations, like they still are very much less developed than our USSR.
 
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Less developed than the USSR but still more developed than their OTL parallels, CMEA is consuming far more resources than historical rates as well. Plus we've been looting them for natural resources since the 1940s anyways, coal has said "Massive Import" for the past like 25 years and we're not getting it from Australia or whatever, all the Polish coal has been turned into Soviet electricity already.

This is what the Balakirev report was about, there's an energy cliff getting closer every day and unless somebody figures out a perpetual motion machine in the next 5 years there is no magical fix. Balakirev already checked to see if the Poles had any secret untapped coal deposits before writing the report, I would assume. The closest thing we do have to a perpetual motion machine is nuclear power, and we're spending about as much money as we can afford on it in response (tbh we might be spending more than we can responsibly afford but needs must).
 
Redshirt Army said:
Going ham on nuclear power, to a degree that dwarfs anything that happened OTL, is important for a variety of reasons, and one of them is simply that having more energy to work with is very good for a society.
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Yeah, it's necessary, but, as I pointed out in my last post, expending it would also be ruinously expensive.

(We spent 4700 cred for each 60 Tw/h/y added, in comparison, we spent 6700 cred for 793 Tw/h/y for coal)
 
We already know what Atommash's first generation autodice look like from the results where we completed the first stage. Full source below but TL;DR it's 360RpD for construction over 1975-79 and then over 1980-84 we get +90 electricity and +20 RpY per die.

Blackstar said:
Atomash(Stage 1/3): The development of a dedicated center of reactor manufacturing has been theorized through much of the past plan with little concrete work done on development. Now that the nation has mobilized massive industrial and technical resources the project itself can be made into a reality. The plant itself is meant for the series assembly line production of VVER-1000 cores along with several facilities for the production of associated turbines and machinery. The project represents one of the largest economic investments and is going to be definitive for the economy of Rostov. Initial production lots will take at least two years to improve production to scale from completion with current plans calling for the capacity to produce four nuclear cores per year. (406/300 Stage 1 Complete) (106/200 Stage 2) (-104 CI10 Electricity +2 Steel +1 Non-Ferrous +2 Educated Labor) (Unlocks Power Plant Construction(Nuclear VVER-1000): (-360RpY, +90 Electricity/y, and +20 RpY Post Construction)
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VVER-1000: 4 R/Electricity/Year, slowly approaching 2.67 R/E/Y after 30 years of operation thanks to the +20 RpY rebate

In comparison we have...
Supercritical Coal: 2.67 R/E/Y
Combined Cycle Gas: 3.33 R/E/Y
Hydroelectric Projects: Varies heavily and also mostly tapped out, but somewhere around 3.25-3.75ish R/E/Y
VVER-500: 8 R/E/Y

So Atommash did literally more than double the efficiency of nuclear power spending, and thanks to the rebate it's competitive with gas on a 10-year timeline and coal on a 30-year timeline, so even without any license extensions the Atommash VVER-1000 is still competitive with coal when counted over its lifetime. When accounting for the cost of coal mines, gas fields, etc. that are additional costs to the coal/gas power in excess of their autodice construction costs then nukes probably break even after something more like ~8 and ~20-25 years with gas/coal respectively, but that's much harder to neatly quantify and also then I'd have to count Atommash in with the cost of nukes, so just call it a wash bc I don't want to do math today.

And of course even if nukes are competitive from the perspective of us in the year 2000, it's currently 1975 and we have to cough up all the capital up front that we won't see properly returned until the 2000s/2010s.
 
Ah, well thanks, so we need more nuclear power but we are already going at the max rate, and because we are putting so much resources on this single basket it makes it difficult to for exemple try to extend this deadline a bit more with Oil and Gas power for exemple, well we really are in a conundrum them, as we need power right now and can't wait without breakind expectations and getting sacked.
 
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agumentic said:
Numbers change a bit with more dice due to mass production efficiency.
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Not with Atommash I don't think, like that's the entire reason we built a whole dedicated factory to mass produce just VVER-1000s and nothing else instead of relying on the smaller machine shops below our level of abstraction. Should be safe to assume that 3 Atommash dice is just 3x the effects of 1 die, or close enough to do some rough math with at least.
 
Crazycryodude said:
Not with Atommash I don't think, like that's the entire reason we built a whole dedicated factory to mass produce just VVER-1000s and nothing else instead of relying on the smaller machine shops below our level of abstraction. Should be safe to assume that 3 Atommash dice is just 3x the effects of 1 die.
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We have previews in Discord showing otherwise.
 
Oh sick, missed that. Just looked them up. With those numbers then...

VVER-1000s start out at 3.33 R/E/Y immediately and approach 2.67 R/E/Y over 10 years of operation. Which is significantly better than the 1 die rate, I think it might have been overtuned a little too much in VVER's favor if the game design objective is to have it break even in 20 years? Idk I might be doing the math different than Blackstar.

If it actually does break even in 10 years of operation though nukes are significantly more attractive on a timescale we actually care about instead of distant 21st century endgame.
 
Even with Atomash helping in reducing the cost per dice of nuclear power-plants, we still need to reduce the growth of our energy consumption, otherwise we will just add nuclear atop coal and gas instead of in place of.
The "soft goal" of 200 additional Tw/h per year would allow us to stop coal power-plants production but keep the existing ones.
The "hard goal" of 150 (and bellow) additional Tw/h per year would allow us to start shutting down coal power-plants.
(If we keep the current non-coal electricity production level)

Increasing nuclear production with these goal would reduce the number of gas power-plants built.
 
Crossposting more napkin math to the thread:

I'm not really in a state to do a full proper historical analysis right now, but for the snapshot turn of 1974 at least the "true" cost of coal power is ~3.5-3.75 R/E/Y after you account for the net loss in electricity and net increase in resource cost to build the coal mines required to feed the power plants. So VVER-1000s are actually surprisingly competitive even at the 1 die rate with no rebates, and extremely close/maybe even technically better with mass production advantages. Especially as coal continues to get more expensive, the cost of VVER-1000s could actually be LOWER than the cost of coal power plants + coal mines counted together even if the standalone coal plant with no mines looks cheap at first glance.

Not counting the cost of Atommash in the VVER's number because I am feeling shamelessly partisan in favor of nukes, but it probably doesn't change the math by more than ~5 years or so.
 
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The main way we reduce energy consumption isn't going to be intentional policy as that would get bala ejected from office at relativistic speeds, it's more weathering it until our explosive growth naturally tapers off. If we can make it to like, 85 we SHOULD be doing pretty good as by that point we should be well into a comparatively less power hungry services transition which means that atommashs constant stream of reactors should be able to start matching consumption
 
VonVonson said:
The main way we reduce energy consumption isn't going to be intentional policy as that would get bala ejected from office at relativistic speeds, it's more weathering it until our explosive growth naturally tapers off. If we can make it to like, 85 we SHOULD be doing pretty good as by that point we should be well into a comparatively less power hungry services transition which means that atommashs constant stream of reactors should be able to start matching consumption
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The challenge right now isn't to reduce energy consumption but to reduce the growth of energy demand. Yes, it mean indirectly reducing the economical growth, but it's temporary.
 
Worth noting also that over time, we'll have opportunities to modernize Atommash's production. But yeah, heavy industry plans and to a lesser extent chemical industry plans are dirty words now. Infrastructure, Services, and to some extent Light Industry are the comparatively disinvested categories in this union, and they're all much less energy hungry.
 
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Crazycryodude said:
If it actually does break even in 10 years of operation though nukes are significantly more attractive on a timescale we actually care about instead of distant 21st century endgame.
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One wonders if even larger reactors will show up if we're indeed going all in nuclear. After all, it would indicate to the designers that there is enormous demand for as much nuclear power as possible as cheaply as possible. And if I recall correctly larger reactors have some scaling advantages due to better power densities.

So perhaps we could get VVER in the 1200-1500 range from this as early as the 80s already, with hopefully various design improvement that help reduce their cost to power ratio a bit.
 
And in the future we will get better energy distribution and that maybe what we need to deal with this energy crisis a bit, as we discover inefficient things in our own grid that degrade the energy and make us lose a lot of energy that could be used to other things.
 
We could also start a fast breeder reactor project to allow us in the future to recycle nuclear waste.

France Phoenix reactor construction started in 1966, so it would not be impossible, if we focus on nuclear energy, to start something similar to get some experience and tinker with the design, hopefully having a industrial design ready in the 80's or 90's
 
Undeadmuffin01 said:
We could also start a fast breeder reactor project to allow us in the future to recycle nuclear waste.

France Phoenix reactor construction started in 1966, so it would not be impossible, if we focus on nuclear energy, to start something similar to get some experience and tinker with the design, hopefully having a industrial design ready in the 80's or 90's
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Blackstar said:
Further centralized facilities for processing nuclear fuel and storing waste will be developed to minimize the burden on current temporary storage systems.
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We're already dealing with waste reprocessing this plan, and nuclear fuel prices are not much of a issue tbh, which kinda negates the main attraction of a breeder reactor.
 
Anyway, next plan we need to seriously invest in our Service sector, we've neglected it in order to invest in heavy industries, which is more vulnerable to supply shocks.

I still think we should do a LI plan though, since we've set up a competitive semi-conductor and electronics industry. The late 70s is exactly when the consumer electronic sector began to boom, and we drastically increased purchasing power so we have a massive consumer base. I've come around to the ideia of a "VHS and MTV plan" (Services/LI).
 
Undeadmuffin01 said:
We could also start a fast breeder reactor project to allow us in the future to recycle nuclear waste.

France Phoenix reactor construction started in 1966, so it would not be impossible, if we focus on nuclear energy, to start something similar to get some experience and tinker with the design, hopefully having a industrial design ready in the 80's or 90's
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Vi'Talzin said:
We're already dealing with waste reprocessing this plan, and nuclear fuel prices are not much of a issue tbh, which kinda negates the main attraction of a breeder reactor.
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We also built four experimental fast breeders this plan, and they'll come online in the late 1970s..
 
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