Exactly, as I wrote. Which is why they were able pursue the option "shut everything down at once and fix immediately" without any negative repercussions apart from EDFs bottom line for that one year.

(Though that apparently was not the biggest negative impact on their bottom line that year. The bigger one was being compelled by law to sell electricity to their competitors at 4 cents/kWh and having to buy it back at market rates that were spiking due to the energy crisis).

There was also the option "stagger the shutdowns and take a slightly elevated risk of one of the triple-redundant cooling systems failing". Which they might have preferred to reducing electricity supply for the country or accelerating repairs. But they didn't have to do that.

> So things need to work under poor policies, too.

Nothing works under arbitrarily bad policy, and such a standard is not applied to anything in the real world.