Not at all! Nuclear is an excellent compliment to renewables and as a companion source to support the grid they are actually really effective. They’re also really useful in situations where renewables just aren’t an option such as large scale shipping. Obviously we haven’t seen any nuclear container ships yet but that’s mostly around startup and infrastructure costs as well as outdated regulations.
With small nuclear reactors becoming commonplace I wouldn’t be supprised if we start to see nuclear shipping becoming a thing in industry in the next 20-50 years.
Its already been proven as a reliable, safe, and effective power source in a naval context. The main hangup people seem to have is with accidents at sea, however again, the militaries of the world have already proven nuclear reactors safe in a number of accidents where a nuclear vessel has been lost and the reactors shut down safely and did not cause release of nuclear material.
Iterative development like that isn’t uncommon in engineering as a whole. Simulation can get you a long way but there’s a hard limit to that. You don’t think spacex designed a starship to use without running extensive simulations to try and figure it out before hand right?
Sometimes you need to test in the field just to find out what bits you missed. Structural engineers will simulate and calculate extensively but they’ll still build scale models and test pieces because it’s the most reliable and effective way to ensure you’re covering as many bases as possible.
Its not an either/or situation here. They’re doing the testing and simulation and applying it IRL to find out where things break.