The many of citizens of the Frontier live and work in close association with nuclear power plants- witness the common place use of atomic drives on star ships. This technology is fairly compact, reasonably safe and mature (its been around awhile and most of its bugs have been worked out.<br /><br />No reason that compact nuclear reactors would not be used to power cities, especially in a setting with an energy based economy. One side benefit would be free heat. Cooling down a reactor on a planet is commonly done with water and this produces steam. My old plumbing partner use to say, "You can heat a barn with steam heat." there are pros and cons to steam heat vs forced hot water but in a new start up colony where there may be extensive city planning before any ground is broken the plan may call for a reactor and waste heat to be recycled via a steam heat system piped through underground pipes in steam tunnels beneath the city. Since your going to the trouble of building the infrastructure for the steam pipes you could naturally use the same tunnel for power lines, water and sewage pipes as well. this would mean a maze of tunnels beneath a city like Port Loren.<br /><br />Since the underground is riddled with tunnels prior to the neccessity of mass transport, for simplicity they installed a mono rail after the fact rather than a subway.
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