Reasons behind them are not efficiency nor safety but flexibility: in a changing world we need flexible infra, that's while while most denied it we really push

Reasons behind them are not efficiency nor safety but flexibility: in a changing world we need flexible infra, that's while while most denied it we really push air and sea research for logistic because they do not need roads or rails, or they do not needs thing that demand years, decades to be built and can't change much in quick terms. For nuclear the target is being able to deploy many small plants where we need them quickly vs create in a decade or more one big + adapt the electricity grid to that. Let's say a powerful landslide crush a main high-voltage line: how many people are affected? How many cascading effects? How much time and cost to restore? Vs how quick and economic is just deliver by air few diesel generators? The issue with them is the hyper-big amount of fuel they need, but if we ever been able to create really small nuclear generator we can imagine future small cities with local-only infra for their electricity needs. That allow for hyper-big flexibility. I suspect such push is done because of climate change and wars that probably, inevitably follow, so we want to be able to keep a kind of civil society in the storm... There will be a rush for the arctic but with melting permafrost is next to impossible developing infra there beside a very small scale. There will be a vast set of mass relocation due to floods and wildfires so again we need to be able to respond in emergency mode quickly. Probably no one is really sure what will happen, at what scale, in how many years and anyway planning for space exploration expansion we need something small enough to fit satellites and ships to Mars and Moon so, for earth we will need them to de-carbonize shipping... They are not something we can build for tomorrow morning so research on them is useful for many reasons. I can't be sure, but IMVHO that's the most significant reasons behind this push.