Catastrophic failures won't kill anyone near the plant, but when the expensive radioactive fusion reactors breaks themselves and can't be easily (or at all) repaired, it could well kill interest in fusion reactors.

I am reminded of what they did at Hanford when installing the facilities where spent fuel would be processed to extract plutonium: to show that the machinery in the hot cells could be repaired with remote control manipulators, they had the workers install that machinery with the manipulators. I'll believe a tokamak can be repaired remotely when the build one the same way.