Newer designs are not used because the environmentalists would rather have political power than electrical power. We have the know-how to design standardized reactors and build them by the hundreds, but not the will.
The meteor problem is even easier to solve. We need to build observation telescopes, lots of them. We then use off-the-shelf rockets to paycheck off-the-shelf nuclear bomb interceptors mounted on almost-off-the-shelf delivery platforms.
Yes, why use simple cheap solar panels that can easily be replaced if we can over engineer everything to the nth degree?
Thank you for illuminating the core difficulty of too much centralisation: mounting problems and mounting costs.
Looking at Fukushima, it is not the terrorists and the meteors that frighten me the most. It is the simple combination of the everyday events like earthquakes, with corruption, inefficiency, cost-cutting and the culture of secrecy that fosters and supports it all. These are the real but invisible dangers that you cannot shoot down from your robotic space platforms.
The meteor problem is even easier to solve. We need to build observation telescopes, lots of them. We then use off-the-shelf rockets to paycheck off-the-shelf nuclear bomb interceptors mounted on almost-off-the-shelf delivery platforms.