Yup. One of those few areas where the capital required is so massive it can bankrupt even big dogs if they fuck up. See Westinghouse. Need some more gov joint investment or it will be the same state in 20 years as it is now.
Tiny, safe, low-cost reactors are a better fit for off-grid power and heat in remote areas.
It's easier to secure a massive plant than a thousand small ones.
Imagine the outcome of some underpaid and overworked cable runner digging into a buried mini-reactor with a JCB digger. Or a trucker falls asleep at the wheel and drives their Mack truck through an above-ground reactor.
The difference is between the media coverage being "Idiot drives truck into nuclear facility, is arrested, no damage" and "Idiot digs into mini-reactor, irradiates neighbourhood".
And that's before people start yelling "Not in my back yard!"
I think your last reasons are probably more influential. Nobody knows or seems to care much about sites like where the above incident occurred. And so far such incidents have been fairly contained, at least in the U.S. In some other parts of the world neighborhoods do become contaminated on rare occasion.
Though of course aside from not quite existing yet and probably needing a smart grid to coordinate properly these will take full-bore hits from NIMBY.
There are plenty of sites that would be happy to host nuclear, if it were possible to build. Vogtle and Summer are our recent examples, and NuScale is deploying soon too.
NIMBYs have not held back nuclear as much as the industry itself.
I'm surprised the (US) military isn't looking into these more.
I would think it would reduce /simplify the logistics of hauling diesel for generators over hell's half-acre.
One issue was that small-package reactor designs of the 50s and 60s required highly enriched uranium... which doesn't seem like the best idea to leave lying around at (by definition) remote outposts.
I wonder if there's potential for a similar approach here?
What he may have been talking about is activation of troublesome elements that cause contamination that interferes with access. A prime example of this is the wear resistant alloy Stellite, used in valve seats. It's an alloy of cobalt. Some cobalt does wear off, gets circulated through the reactor, and is transmuted to 60Co, which increases the radiation field around all the piping.
All the materials in your reactor that are exposed to neutrons need to be purged of troublesome trace elements that can cause this sort of activation.
It has to do with strict traceability, design validation, and testing-proven performance more than it does anything about nuclear aspects.