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15 hours ago@frezik there is an economic case for three nuclear reactor applications.
Medical isotopes need to come from somewhere, and so far as I’m aware, you can’t do all of them with particle accelerators.
Marine power; your 250,000 DWT bulk transport or large container ship pollute significantly, can’t go solar, and marine nuclear is not obviously a bad technical option. (They can maybe go with some sort of fuel cell, but that’s not developed tech.)
High-latitude baseline power.
@fullsquare Sub reactors use enriched for service life (and some compactness); having to get things through the pressure hull is such a pain you will pay high upfront costs to not do it. A reactor designed to push a large cargo vessel around doesn’t have those constraints and could be designed for easy refueling. (There are some marine thermal siphon designs with very few moving parts, come to that.)
High latitude hydro has “and it froze” issues, same after anything else outside up there.