A nuclear optical clock would use the same principle of operation, with the important difference that a nuclear transition instead of an atomic shell electron transition is used for laser stabilization. The expected advantage of a nuclear clock is that the atomic nucleus is smaller than the atomic shell by up to five orders of magnitude, with correspondingly smaller magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole moments, and is therefore significantly less affected by external magnetic and electric fields. Such external perturbations are the limiting factor for the achieved accuracies of electron-based atomic clocks. Due to this conceptual advantage, a nuclear optical clock is expected to achieve a time accuracy approaching 10, a ten-fold improvement over electron-based clocks.