I believe that after 9/11, we required all new nuclear plants to be able to withstand the impact of a 737. So it's just a little more complicated.
Or build an underground parking lot, park the SMR in it, put a serious door in front, and use the space above it for something else.
Conventional construction underground, especially of something complex, is expensive. But much of the point of an SMR is that it’s built off site and then installed. Driving a container down a ramp or lowering one off a crane is straightforward.
> Small modular reactors (SMRs), proposed as the future of nuclear energy, have purported cost and safety advantages over existing gigawatt-scale light water reactors (LWRs). However, few studies have assessed the implications of SMRs for the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle. The low-, intermediate-, and high-level waste stream characterization presented here reveals that SMRs will produce more voluminous and chemically/physically reactive waste than LWRs, which will impact options for the management and disposal of this waste. Although the analysis focuses on only three of dozens of proposed SMR designs, the intrinsically higher neutron leakage associated with SMRs suggests that most designs are inferior to LWRs with respect to the generation, management, and final disposal of key radionuclides in nuclear waste.