>>532299316
like five guys in the middle of nowhere in untamed wilderness don't cause a meaningful amount of pollution with vanilla power generation methods/tech so it still wouldn't matter.
the typical crashlanded strat is literally rushing straight to geothermal. even chemfuel isn't fossil fuels, it's biodiesel that you can make from fucking rice and ground up dead raiders.
There's not even coal in base game, there's uranium but the best use is for building clubs and maces with it to smash people's skulls in, not making radioactive waste.
There's some mods that add things like natural gas or rimatomics but nothing in vanilla rimworld is producing meaningful amounts of pollution with how tiny colony sizes are. Burning wood for campfires isn't gonna make toxpacks which are so bad they cause biome-wide toxic fog and and lethal pollution, whatever the fuck toxifier generators are running on is worse than black lung coal mining (which is the whole point, it's literally free zero effort power that doesn't even need to be plugged in, with the tradeoff of dealing with pollution/wastepacks).

Mechanitors generate wastepacks because otherwise they'd be stupidly overpowered and there'd be no reason not to make every single pawn one with max bandwidth, lategame you can still just farm atomizers but that requires killing an endgame enemy every time so it has a tradeoff