What if the sale and possession of Uranium was unregulated?

Ever since the dawn of the atomic age, the sale and possession of the fundamental fuel for atomic reactors and atomic bombs -- Uranium -- has been very tightly regulated. It is highly illegal to possess more than seven pounds of Uranium in the U.S. How illegal? Firstly, if you possess eight or more pounds of Uranium, you must pay the Government eighty thousand dollars a year. Secondly, you must regularly submit to full physical and mental evaluations by teams of medical doctors and psychiatrists to ensure that you are in perfect physical and mental health at all times. Thirdly, you must regularly pass rigorous written exams containing hundreds of questions dealing with obscure and obsolete issues in nuclear reactor regulation and design -- bear in mind, not surprisingly under these circumstances, nuclear reactor design has scarcely changed since the 1950's. After all, how could the technology possibly progress, given this crushing a level of regulation? There are, of course, many, many other restrictions and regulations. Effectively, it is quite impossible for anyone to possess substantial quantities of Uranium without being specifically selected for this purpose by the government. So, let's just suppose that this wasn't the case. Any backyard inventor could get hold of as much Uranium as they wanted, to play with and build atomic reactors with. They couldn't build atomic bombs, that requires a functional reactor and an extensive process of plutonium enrichment, which governments could monitor and regulate fairly easily. But, there probably would be a problem with "toxic dumps", and possibly a problem with dirty radiation bombs from some crazies. However, on the plus side we'd have a great deal of technical progress from creative inventors, and most of our energy problems would probably be solved in a creative and effective way. Space travel would occur on the lines of the Orion Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) Who knows? Maybe Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity would be proven wrong, on direct testing, and the Speed of Light is no practical limit, at all. Maybe we could go to the stars. In a reasonable period of time, that is. Because, undoubtedly, the field of Physics has been affected in fundamental ways by the Government's restrictions on the possession of Uranium. How could it not be? The most obvious, practical application of Physics has effectively been made illegal. No one can freely investigate fundamental issues in new energy technologies, in the most obvious, practical way. Instead, they engage in complex, abstruse theoretical speculations, and are awarded major prizes for doing so. They pursue dead end technological investigations in an effort to somehow go around the Government restrictions. The entire field of Physics is hamstrung. Thoughts?