In all endeavors, but in Nuclear Engineering in particular, complexity costs money.
The Schattke Advanced Nuclear Engineering innovation is recognizing this, and having simplicity drive the engineering, thus lowering costs across the board, and delivering nuclear power faster and less expensively than anyone ever envisioned. The SANE Simple Advanced Fast Reactor module is an example of this. But why does complexity cost?
Every thing you do in nuclear must be checked. Every bolt tested and verified, every weld x-rayed and examined, every installed system planned, checked and verified. Because radiation, while not terribly dangerous, is insidious - you can't see it, hear it, smell it, taste it or feel it in deadly doses. Oh, some particularly bad times, people could feel a burn or see flashes... but those situations are extremely rare.
So, fewer welds means fewer inspections. Fewer pieces means fewer inspections, fewer simulations of interactions - fewer people needed to verify it is correct. The ideal would be a nuclear power reactor with just one piece... put in nuclear fuel, get out electricity. We cannot quite do that, but I believe we can go from a 20,000 page Safety Analysis Report to a 30 or 40 page one - because the system has only a handful of parts and the interactions between them are not overlapping.
The paradigm is not sexy. It is not easy - it takes a lot of time and effort to keep engineering focused on simplicity. Most engineers think efficiency or Intellectual Property is more important. Nothing could be further from the truth. intellectual property is a fool's goal. If I can build a device simply that using only off the shelf expired patents, I save money. Efficiency as a goal when your fuel is orders of magnitude cheaper is insane. Literally - A nuclear power plant uses about $50,000 to generate a gigawatt-day of power. Natural gas would cost seven times as much for fuel. So you can see, the nuclear power plant's fuel cost is NOT the driving force behind their levelized cost of electricity - complexity is.