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If you think about this for a minute, maybe you'll be able to form a theory for why this is already very common for military vessels, but not so much for unarmed civilian ones...

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Icebreakers are not military vessels and they have nuclear reactors.

Probably initial cost is the reason this did not become something more common.

Yes, but they're also not regular old merchant ships by any means. All existing ones see to be operated by a Russian government-owned corporation.

I guess this is not exactly "cost", but also lifetime spans. A nuclear reactor can sustain a ship for about 20+ years, and that lifetime is too long for many ships, who would be headed out to the scrap yard in less time than that.

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