Every damn power plant is a glorified steam engine

I wonder if nuclear would get more traction If it was pitched as enhanced steam power instead

I wonder how fast we could get a steam train to go if we stuck a suitably shaped non-critical amount of plutonium in the firebox.

Why don't we just pipe our water all the way out to the sun and pipe the steam back to earth.

Hydro isn't. Nor is solar photo voltaic, wind, or tidal, but yeah, nearly everything else is. In a combined-cycle natural gas or diesel plant half of the power generated isn't steam power, but the other half is.

Oh yeah! I did that for my house. We have free heat and power. It's a bit of a pain in the ass to build the pipeline that far out and it took me many more hours than expected, but, the system toots along just fine.

if we stuck a suitably shaped non-critical amount of plutonium in the firebox.

Non-critical? There isn't much energy released from natural decay compared to criticality. We created things like this to power space probes like the Voyager I and II craft. 4.5kg of this Plutonium created about 2500w of thermal energy the the beginning of its life and the power declines from there.

source

So I need 80 tons of it in my firebox?

Well, you'd then have another problem. Unlike coal/wood/oil fuel, you can't turn off radioactive decay.

You'd have megawatts (gigawatts?) of thermal energy boiling off all your water pretty quickly, and likely eventually melting down your steam engine firebox, and it would be that hot for decades!