Some Cold War craziness here.
Saw those engines back in the 80's when I had a couple of summer jobs at the INEL- which is what it was called back then.
There have been quite a few attempts at nuclear-powered aircraft, with safety issues ranging from "would leave an exhaust trail of nuclear waste everywhere it goes and irradiate everything nearby" with early concepts, that were eventually worked down to merely "should be OK as long as you don't crash it because the crash site would become a Chernobyl preview" before the projects were cancelled.
Also look into Project Pluto, an idea for a planet-terrorizing nuke-dropping infinite-range cruise missile that could cause damage with its supersonic shockwave alone. The US Military shut it down after realizing that it was too terrible a weapon to create. A story that might restore some of your faith in humanity...until you learn that more recently, Putin decided to try the exact same thing not long before the Ukraine invasion - they call their version Burevestnik and they already had a nuclear accident with a prototype.
They did fly an "NB-36H" in the 50s -- a B-36 with an operational nuclear reactor on board. It didn't power the airplane, it was just to test the shielding, and what they learned from it was that the idea was unworkable.
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