Exactly correct. The techniques for repair of radioactive equipment are still in their infancy, and seem to progress only with each accident (due to their inhe

Exactly correct. The techniques for repair of radioactive equipment are still in their infancy, and seem to progress only with each accident (due to their inherent costs). Robots die in minutes in a hard radiation environment, and we don't make any new microprocessors with rad hard techniques (though maybe RISC V will change that). From a safety critical analysis POV there has been a huge change in technical capacity over the last 20 years, but no one in the field would say we're close to strong safety, especially now in regards to software intensive systems. IoT just isn't going to be the same with radiation, you can leap from a correct state to an unsafe one at any point, dozens of bits being flipped every second, transistors misbehaving, faults between silicon layers... Completely unrelated logic is in the same fault compartment of critical trusted logic. So if you have 50 reactors, that's 50 control systems, plus the shared infrastructure (water/electricity/data/fuel in and out, fire suppression). If you remove one for refuelling you're moving/vibrating a radioactive system with lots of pipes which are now fragile due to radiation. All the stress analysis techniques we use on planes are very hard to use on plants due to lack of access. It seems to me like we're just beginning to understand the complexity of SMRs and, contrary to the PR, they will take a long time to mature. Everything about nuclear is nonlinear and coupled. Production line techniques are all about equipment that operates in the known region, and the consequences are not too bad when it departs from that because the operator is at fault.