I was in that boat. I'm 56 now, and I've already had friends taken by cancer. It seems much more like a crapshoot at this point.
I only really remember PeeWee's Playhouse on the big screen in the student union building on Saturday mornings when we were all hung over. It was a trip.
That's just not true. The Westinghouse AP1000 was given type approval in 2011. It's what is referred to as a GEN3+ reactor. A lot of R&D was put into simplifying the design, reducing the number of pipe runs, valves, pumps etc compared to GEN2 reactors. It also used large sub assemblies that were factory built off-site then moved for final assembly.
In theory they should have been cheaper to build, but they weren't. Large assemblies that don't fit together properly need a lot of very expensive site time for rework. There were other issues on top of that, which just compounded the assembly problems. It's how Vogtle ended up going from $12B to $30B+, and V.C Summer went from $9B to an estimated $23B when the project was cancelled while under construction.
The EPR units from Areva were similar GEN3+and received type approval in the early 2000s. They had similar cost overruns, for similar reasons.
I have strong reservations about SMRs. So far the cost/MW is about on par with traditional reactors while the amount of waste increases by 2 to 30x traditional reactors depending on technology used.
There are reasons why reactors moved from 300-600MW units to 1000MW+ in the first place. The increased output would cover what was thought to be marginal increase in costs. That turned out to be at least somewhat true.