well i had to streamline some stuff for playability over the years, like there was lots of complaints that it was too hard to find uranium to even make a couple of fuel rods, and i didn't want to force people to have to wait years for the right trader to turn up before they could even start any of this research, which is the case unless you weren't using stuff like trader mods but you have to develop a mod assuming people are only playing vanilla like i do.

there's also huge up front costs in research and resources to make the reactors that can even use the fuel, so like with real life the reactor is the main cost and the fuel is cheap as chips. And people compare it all to just having some geothermals and solar/wind or one of the many other power mods out there and i had to balance it out so the up front cost and the cost of the fuel and the wait to get it wasn't so terrible that it was faster and cheaper to just make a room full of fuel generators, its like with Rimefeller people think the rate that you can make chemfuel is insane, but i had to make it that fast to compete against vanilla chemfuel refining just turning forests or rice into fuel, which is much cheaper and faster to get up and running and actually produces chemfuel very fast when you have a couple of fast workers doing it.

i used to have an enrichment phase for the uranium in Rimushima but its just a really long timer you have to wait for before you can really start doing anything, and you couldn't speed it up by having better pawns or anything so i scrapped it so you can just get on with the research phases and get a reactor up and running, again people already complain that waiting for spent fuel to make bombs is a slog so i have to provide cheat options so putting a timer on whats basically the first step in making a reactor kinda sucked, and if i added it back in now people would be pretty pissed off with me.

with the reprocessing i made it "simple" so you dont have too many resources to manage, so its just a box you put some petrol and nuclear fuel in and you get your pu for bombs and mox, your du for ammo and mox, and some waste you have to store in a mine, the timer on it isn't as big of a deal compared to setting up your first reactor because its an endgame activity which traditionally are pretty slow, you already have plenty of other stuff up and running so waiting a couple of weeks to make your base destroying bombs isn't that annoying.

its already unrealistic enough that you can make all this stuff on a desolate planet so a couple trade offs on realism for playability here and there is worth it, something you learn while making mods for a long time is to stop trying to go too hardcore with your idea and dial it back so normal people can just enjoy it while feeling like they are doing something complicated

Ok. Thanks for the explanation. It's a shame so many people would complain about this. Personally I prefer gaming to be more realistic than the mainstream.

I suppose it would be too much hassle to make this step optional so that people who don't like it can just turn it off and be happy as well?

yer that means doing loads of work for a feature only a tiny handful of people would ever find or switch on

Ok. No worries