Do all reactors need to be connected to heat pipes?

[Erundil]

If I have a row of nuclear reactors, should there be heat pipes running from all of them to my heat exchangers, or is it enough to connect one of them and that one then transfers the heat of the adjacent reactors as well?

[The Chaotic Coder]

Heat can transfer from one reactor to another and then to heat pipes, so only one reactor in a cluster needs to have heat pipes directly connected to it. HOWEVER, Reactors will not heat up past 1000 degrees. They'll still use fuel at the normal rate, but it'll be wasted. So, making the heat path as short as possible (going through the minimum number of entities before it reaches the exchanger) is generally a good idea if you're making power plants with a lot of reactors.

[Killcreek2]

Just to add ~ reactor cores have a larger heat transfer rate than heat pipes do (x10), this covers both core-core & core-HX.

A core with 3 neighbours (400% output, 16x heat exchangers worth) can output that energy down a single heat pipe ~ but the first HX should be no more than 6-8 heat pipes away, & the last (16th) HX can be approx 56 HP away & still work ok (though the core temp would need to be 900+ degrees to "push" the heat that far in a reasonable time).

I have seen some players use unpowered cores as giant heat pipes in very large setups, due to the higher transfer rate, & because they cover 5x5 tiles at once so the heat propagates out to the HX faster. Rather expensive to build but possibly better for UPS.