[XorNot]

Unless you're actually boarded, why would you drop the reactor? The point is that a hypothetical commercial shipping reactor would have to be a self-contained, intrinsically safe design with no user-servicing - this is the sort of design pebble-bed reactors the general modular reactor concept points towards.

The idea is that the reactor is mounted at the bottom of the hull, basically only provides electricity out as a "black box". It's not reachable by the crew from inside the ship, and gets a set of failsafe charges which cut it loose from the ship if it becomes unhappy about it's situation - i.e. if its GPS signal is cut for too long, if it strays from it's geofence boundary, or if someone tries to breach it's location in the ship.

Even if you paid off the crew, they don't have control over the powerplant. Fairly obviously you wouldn't want to leave a reactor on the seafloor, but if it drops itself then like a blackbox it triggers a sonar beacon and whoever commissioned it (presumably a well-regulated US firm) would respond to collect it.