It seems like robots do not use the Robot Attrition research. Is it possible to use the research to determine whether they explode on death? For some reason I thought this was the case and I'm pretty sure I had them running for hours before the first explosion. Maybe robot attrition uses some kind of lifetime rather than just random chance.

To be fair, the explosions aren't remotely realistic for modern nuclear technology. A robot crashing or breaking down might spread nuclear material around and create a radiation hazard, but there's no way it would create an atomic bomb explosion. So disabling it isn't too bad.