Wonder if much of the world didn't turn away from nuclear power they way they did since the 1960s, if we wouldn't have solved alot of problems like these already given research was stagnant (relative to other research in power generation) for a very very long time.

It'd be a much different field if we had kept it up. I spend a lot of time in nuclear archival material, and facilities like CANEL in Middletown CT absolutely blow my mind. They had hundreds of people working on crazy reactor technologies. They were flowing white-hot lithium metal at 100 mph. But yeah we gave all that up. My friend wrote a pretty good article about this not long ago https://www.ans.org/news/2025-05-08/article-6961/hightempera...