It's worth pointing out that essentially the entire US navy is powered by nuclear reactors that service lives in the 3+ decade range, and it's worked astonishingly well. It's not completely without incident, but wow, yeah, civilian nuclear power could really work if held to military standards of engineering and maintenance.
It's worth pointing out that US civilian nuclear power plants with service lives in the 3+ decade range have worked astonishingly well. It's not completely without incident, but wow, yeah, military nuclear power could really work if held to the same standards of engineering and maintenance.
Naval reactors are different, their scale is two orders of magnitude lower. One could make other safety guarantees at that scale. They also use enriched uranium which means no refuelling is needed during the service life of the reactor. SMRs can also make some of these safety guarantees.
> Given the (relatively) small size of these reactors, why can't they put 100 of them on site at a NPS?
That's what companies developing SMRs aim to do. For instance NuScale has a design using up to 12 modules of 77 MWe each in a separate stainless steel lined concrete pools of water. The modules are quite innovative and incorporates passive safety features such as natural circulation, redundant passive decay heat removal, gravity driven safety systems.
