The ‘new’ reactors are barely more advanced than the old ones and even more complicated.

Nuclear is pretty high end technology, it needs real investment to move forward. The government has shown little interest. Few reactors are built, what we have is aging, the number of people doing R&D is next to nothing.

I disagree, there seems to be a fair amount of R&D happening around small modular reactors, this is likely the future of Nuclear.

Small, self contained, fail safe, sealed reactors that can be build centrally on an assembly line and shipped to destination.

I've seen several different announcements over the last few years of different SMR type reactors.

They have been talking about that for 30 years. It could be done in a very short period of time if real R&D was put into it. Look at submarine nuclear reactors for example.

They have them, they exist but the regulatory frameworks to build and deploy any nuclear technology is horrendously slow.

But they are being built.

https://www.power-technology.com/features/where-will-the-fir...

Look at this project in Canada

https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/reactors/research-reactors/o...

The application was submitted almost 3 years ago and we're barely halfway through the approval process.

So sure rollout has been mega slow but that doesn't mean the technology has not advanced it 30 years. Only that our deployment of it has been slow.