An unfortunate early design. Hopefully the engineering knowledge and access to far better design tools that have developed in the interleaving ~50 years would allow for a much better design today.
Though my hopes must be tempered by the prospect of greed. It would be better if the government(s) created an open design which could reuse off the shelf or components that any corporation could compete to create.
Eh, no.. a failed concept, to grasp the techological deep roots needed to supply something with specialists and machinery at all times, at a location that is 9 months off limits.
DARPA and NASA are currently developing designs to do exactly that under Kilopower, Megapower, and similar programs. Enabling long duration unmanned deep space missions is explicitly one of NASA's goals with this.
I'm no nuclear engineer, but my anecdotal experience has been that nuclear plants need access to large amounts of water for cooling.
I'm assuming a Martian reactor would need some other approach give the relative scarcity of water? Sure ambient temperatures are lower, but equally the atmosphere is not very dense.
Thinking about it, burning diesel is also not attractive (lack of oxygen) and solar is weaker than earth. But I'm not seeing a lot of alternatives to solar...
Primary cooling could be molten salt or liquid metal but unless you take the power out through the Seebeck effect like RTG’s on space probes, you still need water to make steam for turbines, I guess.
I'm certain that a self-contained habitation for a year is a solvable problem; nuclear submarines can be away in the ocean for a comparable time.
A habitat self-sustained for potentially indefinite time (at least half century), while producing its own food and oxygen, is a much taller order.
Unlike Amundsen's, such a station can have a nuclear reactor, with decades worth of fuel.