I’ve always wondered, maybe someone can say:
If we’ve had nuclear reactors on submarines for the past decades why, considering the advances in other similar technologies, has that power not become commonplace for the consumer market?
You have to ask? It is because the cost per watt-hour is still higher than gasoline or coal.
There is no simple “X is better than Y” when it comes to engineering. Everything is a tradeoff. If you want a car that cost 50 times what a normal one does, is heavier, but never needs to be refueled for the next 50 years, then nuclear is the way to go. But no one wants a car like that. Plus there is the whole issue of what happens if you crash.
It is all about cost ratios and tradeoffs. Years ago I picked the brain of a guy at Lockheed who worked on the design of nuclear airplanes. The reason we never build them came down to cost. The only way they were better is in ‘range without refueling’ and the only way you got to the point that nuclear was more cost effective than jet fuel was if you flew around the world. More than once. Who the heck is going to fly that far? Where would they be going?
With 1960s tech you could build an RTG that would power your house for decades. But you could take that same device, pack it with ammonium nitrate, and give cancer to half a city with a terror attack. Suddenly the idea of just continuing to pay your power bill starts looking really good.
Cost? Training?
You can thank Jane Fonda, and "The China Syndrome" for that. The left has opposed nuclear power since the first bomb was dropped. It would be entirely feasible for nuclear sub sized reactors on locomotives, power plants, and things like that. It's the politics that have stopped it.
More people were killed in the front seat of Ted Kennedy's Oldsmobile than in all of the US nuclear power plant accidents in the history of nuclear power.