> it's just that every reactor needs to be playing it's A game every day.
That is not necessarily true of modern reactor designs. Reactors can be designed so that neglect by the operators, loss of coolant and other failures result in the reaction passively coasting to a halt.
This is the big difference between most of the large deployed reactors and the modern designs.
Which leads me to an idea: a power plant divided into four parts, where each part starts construction on 1/3 the eventual power using the newest designs every decade. They run for 30 years. Then deconstruct and rebuild the last one with the newest design.
This would incentivize a continuous market for new designs over the next century.
"Deconstruct" is doing a lot of work here. Nobody knows how to take apart fission reactors promptly after they are shut down at the end of their economic life. All we know how to do is wait many years for activity levels to decline, then incrementally remove materials starting with the least contaminated, which itself takes decades. The materials can only be recycled into other nuclear facilities, which means that essentially none of this material has been recycled, because nobody is building.
Many of the supposed guarantees are valid only in the absence of water and/or oxygen intrusion into the core, which are huge caveats here on planet Earth.
That is not necessarily true of modern reactor designs. Reactors can be designed so that neglect by the operators, loss of coolant and other failures result in the reaction passively coasting to a halt.