[Symmetry]

Yes, but nuclear reactors carried up to space for rockets or electricity can still make sense. Before you turn on your reactor it's not very radioactive, to survive to the present day uranium has to have a very long half-life which means low radioactivity. But as soon as you turn it on you start transmuting the uranium into all sorts of things with much shorter half-lives and so much higher radioactivity.

So its safe to fly a new reactor into a stable orbit, if something bad happens you'll scatter some uranium but that's just toxic heavy metal bad, not radiation hazard bad. Just make sure the orbit is high enough to be stable, not like Kosmos 1402.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_1402