I think people who are anti-nuclear and environmentalist are wrong, but it's not an insane opinion to have. There's no fact you can point to that says nuclear is safer than renewables. I just don't see how the world is realistically going to switch to renewables. We've already seen oil companies use those as distractions from nuclear.
However, nuclear energy is the safest form of energy production we have.
By far.
And that includes Chernobyl and Fukushima.
People overestimate the danger from nuclear energy by incredible amounts.
That doesn't mean that close exposure to a running nuclear reactor won't kill you in short order. That's why we build these things with shielding. A lot of other things will kill you in short order if exposed to them: cars/trains in motion, for example.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X2...
Electricity demand is concentrated in population centers, which themselves require water and produce sewage as a byproduct. Thus it's pretty rare for a place with strong electricity demand to simultaneously have a shortage of water available for cooling. In places with limited freshwater supply, this results in plants using wastewater. Again, thermal plants of all kinds need cooling. Nuclear changes nothing relative to the status quo in this regard.
Cities basically won't let you put a nuclear power station within a stone's throw, never mind in their midst. Have you ever visited London? There's a wonderful modern art gallery, on the side of the Thames called Tate Modern, and it has this enormous space which is called the "Turbine Hall". Huh. Tate Modern's shell was a 300MW oil fired power station named "Bankside". They burned tonnes of oil right in the heart of London until the 1980s to make electricity. People weren't happy about it, but they designed, built, and operated the station because although any fool can see there's toxic smoke pouring out of it into your city, electricity is pretty useful.
In practice nuclear power stations get built somewhere with abundant cheap water, far from population centres yet easily connected to the grid. England has more places to put a Nuke than say, a Hydro dam, but they are not, as you've suggested, "geographically independent", unlike say solar PV which doesn't even stop you grazing animals on the land or parking vehicles or whatever else you might want to do.
"It can function here, but people choose not to" is a very different kind of geographic restrictions than "it is physically impossible for it to work here"
Nuclear power is definitely more geographically independent than solar. There's easily a factor of 3 or 4 difference in output between a solar panel in Australia vs Northern Europe: https://www.altestore.com/pages/solar-insolation-map-for-the...
The only thing a nuclear plant - any thermal plant for that matter - requires is cooling. But that doesn't need to be freshwater. It can be seawater or waste-water, like the Palo Verde plant.
That only really matters if there is some constraint preventing you from building a proportionally larger array at the northern latitudes.
That map doesn't effectively capture the intermittency of solar energy in different climates. In Britain the country gets less than 8 hours of energy during peak winter. It also often goes with overcast skies for extended periods of time. A bigger array does not solve these extended periods of non-production.
> That only really matters if there is some constraint preventing you from building a proportionally larger array at the northern latitudes.