Rolls-Royce have small modular reactors (SMRs) ready to go. The government is dragging its heels.

I rather suspect that one of the principle reasons is the creating and maintaining of the physical security required for such sites. Imagine a country scattered with mini nuclear bombs situated in the middle of nowhere and the cohorts of undesirables coming into the country nearly every day - pc term is 'Bad Actors' who only have to get lucky once- and then imagine the logistics of keeping each site heavily guarded. They have enough problems at the likes of Sellafield and other sites..

Haven't R-R been powering His Majesty's Ships for decades?

I don't think that you can make a bomb out of one, even though they carry a few.

I don't think that you can make a bomb out of one

You can make a "dirty bomb" though - conventional explosives scattering the not only radioactive but usually very toxic fissile material far and wide...

   - Andy.

We (and France) had a fleet of reliable nuclear power stations built and maintained using 1950's technology. I don't think credible to say that we can't operate such things safely and reliably using modern standards. Some problems are not meant to be solved.

Indeed, but you only have to violently destroy the reactor to contaminate a wide area. A ship at sea, especially a military one, is a wholly different entity.

When I first heard about small modular reactors, I was thinking of something that would arrive in a shipping container.  After all, if you can fit one in a submarine and still have room for everything else, then that's got to be about right.

Then if one wasn't enough, you could plonk down a number of them and wire them all up.  That would be great for disused sites, such as Dungeness.  Stick a bunch of them in a corner of the car park.

But it seems that "small" is a relative term.  You still end up building a whole nuclear reactor building for it.

Simon Barker said:

After all, if you can fit one in a submarine and still have room for everything else

That was my point. I understand that they are the size of a dustbin - the old galvanized steel type, not wheely-bins.

The power output must be classified, but if you compare them with a marine diesel engine, they are hardly going to make a large power station.

Simon Barker said:

After all, if you can fit one in a submarine and still have room for everything else

That was my point. I understand that they are the size of a dustbin - the old galvanized steel type, not wheely-bins.

The power output must be classified, but if you compare them with a marine diesel engine, they are hardly going to make a large power station.

In terms of submarine reactors, the household dustbin decription relates only to the core size and those  are near the 10-20 megawatts level. Larger container sized  cores generate ten times that. But the shielding of the core, the fueling ad control mechanism and all the rest of the power plant that gets the heat out is several times that volume, so really you need quite a large volume for the complete plant, even in a submarine.

Mike.