It took 1500 years to fully develop the steam engine, and, the way it's going, it looks like it might indeed take that long to fully develop nuclear power. While nuclear power has existed for
almost a century now, it's still a very poorly understood technology, with innumerable problems and enormous expense involved in attempting to develop any meaningful applications.  Sure, we have a wide range of practical applications, but, there's an uncertainty about them all, and immense problems, and, it appears, the full potential of this energy technology is far from being achievable, at this time.

The first applications of steam engines, during the time of the Roman Empire, were just toys.  And, that's the way it stayed, for about 1500 years.   A combination of lack of interest, lack of imagination, and lack of necessary related technologies posed insurmountable obstacles.   People were reasonably content with the way things were, as they usually are, so no one was interested in this big a change to things.  We have entire theoretical conceptions of reality dedicated to the notion that we can't do new things.  Currently, the most obvious example is Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, which states that we cannot travel faster than light, making colonization of other Solar Systems virtually impossible.  H-bombs would actually give us enough energy to do this, were it not for Einstein's postulates.   Possibly, governments don't really like the idea of people being able to escape them by travelling to other earth-like planets?  Or, maybe wealthy capitalists find the notion of vastly more efficient energy sources a threat to their current monopolistic powers?  Who knows.

Side by side with steam energy, of course, was chemical energy.   And, actually, chemical energy was used to some extent, but, somewhat awkwardly.  All fire is chemical energy, of course, and fire is one of mankind's oldest technologies, far pre-dating our own current species of mankind.  We've had chemical rockets for thousands of years, and, to some extent they were used in warfare, sporadically.   Burning coal as a source of chemical energy became more and more common as human civilization progressed, although it does tend to poison the air badly.

Neither chemical nor steam power can be fully developed as a source of power for engines without high quality iron and steal to build engines with, and related machine tools and machine tooling.  And, of course, the very concept of powered engines has to be developed, first.   Steam engines likely preceded Chemical engines because steam is rather more benign and less destructive than small chemical explosions.

So, what does all this have to do with nuclear power?  I think it means that there are many slips twixt the cup and the lip.  Developing new energy technologies involves many, many stages, often entirely new conceptions of reality that are not easy to conceive of, detailed, precise new technologies that no one has ever seen before, or even dreamed of.  And, no one really knows where to look for these.

Currently, the Chinese are developing the world's first thorium reactor.  That is very good, because there's a lot more thorium around, than uranium.   Will this lead to a nuclear revolution?  Almost certainly not.  But, it is clearly a step in the right direction.

How about controlled nuclear fusion.?  I would argue this is a dead end.  Trying to build a nuclear fusion source that cannot do any damage, but still produces a lot of energy, simply seems to be a contradiction in terms.

How about nuclear bombs as energy sources and power sources.    This is possible, but, surely these "bombs' could be made less "bomb-like" and more "energy-like".  Couldn't this be explored?  It's a new concept, but, as we've seen, historically, new concepts are fundamental to new energy sources.