If Nixon hadn't sent his people to Vietnam in the late 60's and promise the Vietcong a better deal if they walked away from negotiations, He wouldn't have been able to run on 'winning the war' and we would have been out of Vietnam FIVE YEARS EARILER. Nixon was a fuck up, and is still screwing the world today. Piece of shit.
Nixon canceled the Mars program where the vast majority of cutting edge nuclear research was happening - tech like the nuclear lightbulb (search my comments for details) that could have matured and saved us by now. He was no friend to nuclear, just the entrenched nuclear industry.
In fact, they built several experimental setups and were just short of testing fissile material before the program was canceled.
If anyone would like a starting point for research instead of lobotomized rhetoric like "this is magical thinking", request this paper: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19750027209
Yes, let's vaporize nuclear fuel. What could possibly go wrong with this stunning large brain engineering. It is surely no more burdensome on materials than solid fuel sealed away in metal tubes. /s
Yes that's how civilization was built. By pushing material science further and further. Do you think pressurized steam turbines just magically appeared?
Read the papers, they explain it all and characterize the tests.
Vaporizing nuclear fuel is how we enrich it. Uranium => Uranium Hexaflouride sublimed at 57C => Gaseous centrifuge to separate the isotope. We've been doing it since the Manhattan Project, since before nuclear power plants were even a thing.
Comparing uranium hexafluoride vapor at 57 C to incandescent vaporized uranium + fission products at 22,000 C. The materials problems with the latter are just a bit more severe!
