I guess 'it depends'. Integrated steam generators might be safer, as you say, as the primary loop never leaves the pressure vessel, and thus less pipe joints e

I guess 'it depends'. Integrated steam generators might be safer, as you say, as the primary loop never leaves the pressure vessel, and thus less pipe joints etc. that might fail. OTOH the pressure vessel becomes a lot bigger, which limits how big you can make the entire power plant. Making big pressure vessels if fairly tricky, and there's only a few forges in the world capable of making current large reactor pressure vessels. I think this is one of the reasons why the Nuscale reactor is so small (60 MWe IIRC), which might make it hard to get the economics to work out.