Hehe had this discussion not so long ago. To be honest, once I need to worry about it, I'll cheat in a chunkloader and fix the config so that it doesn't require fuel.
Since I'm in SSP, I really don't need to worry like server owners might, and I don't think that walking a certain distance away from your base should make your machines stop working.
Yeah I just moved from SSP to SMP since I tend to cheat too much. haha So now I have to play by the book, but I can't honestly see why we'd use RC anchors when we have the Dimensional Anchors that require no fuel and the server operator can even restrict how many chunks we're allowed to load via their config files or something. I was using a RC anchor in SSP as well, but I didn't know about the other one.