Governments virtually ensure that nuclear innovation will be as slow as possible, if not non-existent. AFAIK the only country making any meaningful progress for nuclear is China, probably because they have a billion fucking people who will all be middle class energy users within a generation or two. The stakes are high for them. In America, researchers can't touch nuclear. There's loads of potential in thorium-based fission power, but the work on that was shelved like 70 years ago because it wasn't useful for creating weapons.