This is one reason I've started to think fusion might be more promising than advanced fission. The regulatory barriers are so light that high school students build reactors and run them on deuterium fuel just like most of the big projects, and it's perfectly legal.

There's quite a lot of work being done on small-scale alternative reactor designs. I wrote up a bunch of them here: http://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestI...