[Kon5ole]

Pebble bed reactors are not safe, they fail for different reasons than other reactor designs but they can still fail.

They don't need fanatical attention to active cooling, but they do instead need fanatical control of the atmosphere near the reactor to prevent fires, for example.

The first prototype was built in Germany in the 60s. It was closed in 1988, had to be bailed out by the German government in 2003 and has of course been a continuous money drain on German taxpayers ever since.

Nice summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor

From basic principles one might consider that anything that generates enormous amounts of power in a concentrated area can never be truly safe. All that energy is always a potential disaster.

Power plants that generate less power but are cheaper to make and can be distributed over a large area to ensure redundancy is a better strategy for both safety and reliability.