Except you can ONLY use steam for heating and transporting it over distance is not efficient. If you turn steam into electricity you can use it for ANYTHING and transport it over long distances efficiently.
What does this mean? Are you imagining a future where individual houses have their own nuclear plants? Or where nuclear plant workers live on-site?
I'm get the argument that we should have more nuclear power, and that some future reactors may be small, but I don't understand the expectation that they would be close enough to residences to pipe steam.
In such tighter conditions, you can easily have enough inhabitants per km² that it would justify building small mobile nuclear reactors.
Who would like to live next to a reactor if it can melt down? Well, you have reactors using fuel pellets locked in marbles that due to their diameter can never meltdown.
- https://newatlas.com/energy/oklo-aurora-nuclear-microreactor... - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a33896110/tiny-nucl... - https://www.nuscalepower.com/products/nuscale-power-module
They target from home to residential scale. I hope they are eventually a thing.