Management can't cut fuel reserves, not because the pilots are unionized but because there are some very strict rules about these fuel estimations prior to take off and margins be damned. And those rules are exactly there because otherwise this kind of incident would happen far more frequently. But it's regulation that is the backstop here, not the pilots.
Regulations are paper. Who enforces the behaviour, of whether to take off or not, on a windy night in central Italy?
Of course the pilots are the backstop, and the unions are theirs, so they can make necessary calls the money doesn't like.
SMRs - like most other technology - are dual use.
[0] - https://www.stimson.org/2021/prospects-for-small-modular-rea...
[1] - https://maritime-executive.com/article/india-to-explore-supp...
[2] - https://www.meretmarine.com/fr/defense/pa-ng-une-propulsion-...
[3] - https://cimsec.org/neither-fish-nor-fowl-chinas-development-...
But that's like trying to prevent cow rearing by outlawing mince. You don't rear a cow for mince, you rear it for steak. The customer will pay for steak pretty much whatever.
My country just had ~180 GWh of lost load from wind, in winter. That's not even a 1-in-5 event, that's a multiple-times-per-year event, and it's billions in cost to the economy. Industry is dead, I've personally seen steel orders go to China because even if renewables were free we could't handle delivery estimates of "lol idk", and nor can anyone else. I just can't comprehend the levels of denial around this, as if my and literally everyone with industrial experience is irrelevant. Data centres want SMRs and that's the easiest, most trivial task to time-shift around I can imagine. Electricity that is not reliable is not the same product, it is not even a comparable product, in no other field would it be treated as such, and if you can't provide an actual monetary estimate for turning it into a reliable product, not just "iT's gEtTiNg cHeApEr BRO", you should not be in this conversation.