Abstract | There has been a lot of discussion on intensity measure optimality for conventional structures, touting the advantages of novel metrics of ground motion intensity to improve upon the efficiency and fidelity of seismic assessment. Yet, somehow this revolution of sorts has not transitioned to nuclear power plant assessments, which cling to the time-honored tradition of the peak ground acceleration (PGA). They do so for the simple reasons of stiffness and mass. That would be stiffness in the assets themselves, typically leading to periods of the order of 0.1 to 0.2sec for both the structures and their nested components, but also in the rigidity of regulations in an understandably ultra-cautious industry. Adding the mass (and cost) of engineering effort required to reassess already established fragilities for hundreds of standardized components, it is no wonder that there is too much inertia to allow moving away from PGA. Would it not be great if someone came along and offered a minimal-error approach for converting existing fragility curves from PGA to any intensity measure of choice? Interestingly, the response characteristics of nuclear power plants may actually favor an equivalent one/two-degree-of-freedom-model based procedure that allows disaggregating existing fragilities back into ground-motion-level constituents and reconstructing them anew with the desired intensity measure parameterization. There is little doubt that safeguarding the integrity of nuclear power plants would still require massive computations rather than rely on shortcuts, yet such an approach can give novel intensity measures a fighting chance to prove that they are worth the trouble for nuclear engineering.