What's the Poseidon Oil nuclear power plant #5 power rating?
I wonder if we have any indication whatsoever to at least some guesstimate of the actual Gecko plant power rating? It's single reactor working, the second one was never finished.
Since it's based on 60s imagination of future technology and they talk about enough power for Gecko, VC and many surrounding camps, while from what we see on the actual game imagery, I'd guesstimate it is actually pretty low rated, in the terms of tens of megawatts. VC is powered by their vault generator, they are squeezing it, but the internal generator could not produce more than few dozen megawatts anyways. (Plus, some other Vaults were, according to canon/bible, powered by geotermal energy, and you won't squeeze much more than such magnitude of power from geotermal UNDERground. Remember, the vaults were not really HUGE, there are drawings and such in the game. We talk about aprox. 1000 ppl per Vault, some technology and such, but like 10 MW is insanely huge amount of power for that. Ordinary household in real world is counted as 1 kW average draw.)
So VC does not need the WHOLE output of the Gecko plant, they just need some surplus to cover the rest of what their vault generator could not handle any longer. There ain't pretty much anything at all in Gecko, not even lamps or such, they draw almost nothing. So that would be me wild guess, whaddaya say?
There was also an old thread about where they take the cooling water from for the Gecko reactor. If it was just tens of megawatts, maybe 100 MW tops, it would also be in accordance with it having no cooling towers and such. Venting such amount of heat is childs play, more or less. The recently completely shut down Bilibino power plant in the russian far east (and north) used graphite-moderated EGP-6 boiling water reactors with natural circulation and just tiny ponds (in four vent-houses) to get rid of heat from condesers. The Palo Verde in the US is practically in a desert so it has just tiny cooling "towers" as the evaporation happens pretty much as it is, no need to force it. Remember they cool 1400MW reactors (so some 2,8 GW of waste heat).