They are muppets with a poor understanding of what they are doing. Ideally there should always be 4 blocks of coolant between your core and the edge of the reactor to capture energy from radiation. Space and materials permitting of course.
It's a little more complicated than that, since fuel rods also fertilize each other so it's not good to isolate the rods from each other completely, but the rule that no fuel rod should touch the casing is pretty hard. Ideally, as mentioned above, there should be 4 blocks of coolant between the rods and the casing, but only in a straight line, i.e. the blocks that form a "+" around the rod should be coolant or other fuel rods, while the blocks that form an "X" around it can be anything, unless there's another rod in a straight line of them of course.
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
C OOOOO C
C OOOOO C
C OOOOO C
C OOOOO C
COOOOYYYYYOOOOC
COOOOYOYOYOOOOC
COOOOYYYYYOOOOC
COOOOYOYOYOOOOC
COOOOYYYYYOOOOC
C OOOOO C
C OOOOO C
C OOOOO C
C OOOOO C
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
CCCCCCCCCCCCC
C OOO C
C OOO C
C OOO C
C OOO C
COOOOYOYOOOOC
COOOOOYOOOOOC
COOOOYOYOOOOC
C OOO C
C OOO C
C OOO C
C OOO C
CCCCCCCCCCCCC
As the other say: No you cannot place fuel rods next to the outer wall to get same efficiency. The "Casing" that you need to transfer the heat from the fuel rods to is an imaginary place, not the actual reactor walls. This also means that you dont need to "chain" the heat from the fuel rods out to the wall. As soon as heat is absorbed by a conductive material it is transferered to this imaginary "casing" and turned into RF/steam.
I am just being stubborn and refusing to call cooling materials "cooling materials"
Every reactor you design have an optimal temperature. You should use the specific reactors optimal temperature(within reason). But you should try and design your reactors to have their optimal temperatures around 900-1000C
There is no "best" or "most efficient" reactor. It is all about compromising. What size can you/do you want to fit in to your build? How much fuel can you/do you want to supply? How much power do you need? How many materials do you have available to build the reactor? How many turbines do you want to use(if any)? Etc.
Dunno, just some error that happens some times. Just hit simulate again or draw something and it goes away.
Heat is only transferred out the sides of Fuel rods to the immediate adjacent blocks and radiation travels horizontally out in only X and Z directions. Therefore there is no need to put expensive Cryotheum or Ender in the corners as no heat or radiation gets to these areas. There are several different "placeholder" blocks you can use to fill the gaps, but Graphite is cheap and it is sure to work in all packs, which I why I chose to use it in this example. It serves no purpose at all in terms of efficiency.
I personally use this ComputerCraft script to control my reactors running:
The Ender is there to absorb radiation. The deal is that Cryotheum is better at conducting heat and changing fast radiation to slow radiation. This is why we use it next to the fuel rods. But in order to turn radiation into power/steam we need to absorb the slow radiation and Cryotheum is bad at that. Ender however is great at absorbing Slow radiation, so a "jacket" of ender around the outside will catch the radiation and produce a bit more power/steam.
No that would not be recommended IMO. For such a relatively small reactor you do not gain enough from absorbing all the radiation, compared to the space you need to do so.
Lolmer recently updated the script so it should work with even the newest versions of ComputerCraft etc.
