[i_am_proteus]

Smaller reactors (which may be, but are not necessarily, "modular") should help with both the build time and cost overrun issue.

The USA has been successfully building small reactors on time, on budget, more or less continuously since the 1950s - they've just been going into warships and submarines and not commercial generating stations.

[teachrdan]

One problem is that military nuclear reactors use more highly refined uranium in order to reduce reactor size. This makes them more valuable targets for terrorists and thus require greater security. Not hard to accomplish on an aircraft carrier, but this would increase cost for a civilian reactor.

[spaetzleesser]

From my experience military equipment is not designed to be efficient in terms of cost. I am pretty sure their designs can’t be used for commercially viable power.

They are also operated in super secure environments like submarines and aircraft carriers. Harder to secure a large number of commercial plants all over the country. Even accidents are much more forgiving out on the ocean vs on land.

[giarc]

So could we not just operate them on water? Many large cities are on water and already have ugly ports. Just build nuclear reactors in ships, park in port and connect to grid. Have coast guard/navy secure them.

[glogla]

They have one in Russia! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov

[spaetzleesser]

Again, look at the economics. I bet it won’t work.

[i_am_proteus]

That's the general thrust of the modular bit - it's easier to build ten 100 MWe plants (mostly) in a factory and ship them to the site of a power station than build a 1GWe monolith on the same site.