That's supposed to be the promise / fix of SMR: plop down a fully self-contained reactor of a few tens~hundreds MWe in a shaft, plug it to the grid and leave it there for a few decades, when it's out of fuel swap it out and go recycle it in a dedicated facility.
Though of course aside from not quite existing yet and probably needing a smart grid to coordinate properly these will take full-bore hits from NIMBY.
The predominant NIMBY strategy is to request a new impact study every 6 months so as to insert delays and restarts into the capital-intensive, highly coordinated construction process, bringing it from merely arduous to nearly impossible. Pre-fabbed reactors would reduce both the attack surface and the per-hit damage considerably.
There are plenty of sites that would be happy to host nuclear, if it were possible to build. Vogtle and Summer are our recent examples, and NuScale is deploying soon too.
NIMBYs have not held back nuclear as much as the industry itself.
The nuclear power plant at Shoreham on Long Island is possibly the most famous example of NIMBYism killing nuclear. The reactor was built and operated at test levels, but the NIMBYs demanded for full operation to include a disaster plan to evacuate all of Long Island (5+ million people) in a completely impossible time span of a few hours.
One issue was that small-package reactor designs of the 50s and 60s required highly enriched uranium... which doesn't seem like the best idea to leave lying around at (by definition) remote outposts.
Though of course aside from not quite existing yet and probably needing a smart grid to coordinate properly these will take full-bore hits from NIMBY.