Civilization advances by trying huge numbers of things, most of which are horrible and bad. The rare winning technologies survive.
Implying that nuclear lightbulbs for terrestrial generation would have been in this elite group of winning technologies is just ludicrous.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium#Centrifuge_te...
Read the papers, they explain it all and characterize the tests.