We already have, in fact several times. All rockets work the same way.

They
throw things out one end of the spacecraft, and this causes the spacecraft to
move in the opposite direction to conserve momentum. A nuclear reactor
makes heat, and this can be used to drive a turbine to produce electricity, or
to vaporize a fuel and expel it as rocket momentum (nuclear thermal rocket
engine). In the former case, the electricity can be used to drive an ion engine,
or a mini-magnetosphere propulsion system. In 1959, NASA had a program
called NERVA (1955-1961), but it was canceled soon after the 900megawatt "KIWI" nuclear rocket was test-fired. This was replaced by the
Phoebus engine in 1965, which operated at 1,500 megawatts. The most
powerful engine of all was the 5,000-megawatt Phoebus 2A tested in June
1968, which ran for 12 minutes at a temperature of 3,700 K. The problem
that engineers encountered with all of these engines was the erosion of the
nuclear core by the flowing rocket gases. About 20 percent of the core would
be ejected out the nozzle every five hours in a highly radioactive plume.
Forty years later, Project Prometheus has been funded by Congress to develop
a high-yield satellite nuclear power in the next five years at a cost of $3
billion. It is not specifically a plan to design a new rocket engine but to crea
te
small reactors to power satellites and planetary rovers in deep space. As Ed
Weiler, chief of the Office of Space Science at NASA, puts it, "For 40 years,
NASA has been doing planetary science in the same way.