As a general rule of thumb I think we need more adoption of nuclear technology to normalise the safe use of the technology, and nuclear would be a great fit for bases on the moon and on mars…
But the problem for Elon is regulatory. Doing anything nuclear requires navigating significant regulation from start to finish. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the regulations would require SpaceX to continue filing paperwork on Earth for any humans near a reactor on Mars being exposed to more radiation from space than the reactor is emitting.
This is the antithesis of how Elon likes to work. If he’s going to get people onto Mars they can’t go and die from air and the rockets can’t be trapped there and he’s going to want to be sure about that before he launches them.
In order to do that he’s going to want to develop multiple iterations of the chemical plant equipment on earth, testing it’s robustness reliability and effectiveness. They know the solar panels will work fine, if they don’t user super expensive ones they’ll be fine using lower efficiency and just adding more square meters of solar panels… but they can’t do that with the oxygen and methane production equipment. They need to know it will work dusty, with perchlorate contamination, with variable electrical supply, and probably even survive a military style airdrop in terms of rough landing with zero impact on its ability to generate and liquefy CH4 and O2. He could split his resources and add the development of a similarly complex reactor (the majority of the complexity is likely to be regulatory since shipment to and operating on Mars rather constrains the design space for a practical reactor) or he can use heaps of reliable panels, trust he can get enough mass to the surface of mars and focus entirely on the development of the critical chemical process equipment he needs on Mars.
