[msandford]

Given that the system has intrinsic safety built in, I'm not sure why regular inspection would be required.

Perhaps the NRC does require regular inspections for existing plants, but none of those existing plants are failsafe are they? If something starts to go wrong, it can snowball very quickly into a much worse situation.

With a MSR the worst-case scenario (short of terrorism) is that you empty into the dump tank until you sort the problem out and restart. If you make the entire facility's floor the dump tank then inspections are going to be rather redundant. Except perhaps to ensure that the dump tank is intact. But that can be made fairly easy I think.