Solar on the other hand scales down to 50MW instillations just fine so you can put it near substations etc. Huge solar parks make sense in locations with lots of sunlight and cheap land, but they aren’t the only option just a trade off in terms of transmission costs vs generation costs.
NYC has large power plants in Manhattan (East River 1, 2, 6, and 7), Queens (650MW Astoria Energy II power station), and Brooklyn (Narrows 1–1 to 2-8) plus a few more.
If anything a solar field requires much less operation expertise and staff to manage than a nuclear power plant. And when it goes bad, it might leech some acid and heavy metals into the soil over years, not leave a 10k year radioactive exclusion zone.
That question dovetails into nuclear's biggest hurdle; the risk for catastrophe is high, both in reality and especially politically, so regulation is high, and thus the cost to build, operate, and decommission is immense.
I mean as an example many companies, especially PG&E can't maintain adequate powerlines, who is banking on the fact that they'll do an even better job when we quintuple the amount of infrastructure and they have to develop a whole new domain of expertise based in battery technology.
Not to mention even the supposedly clean, solar and batteries, still have an enormous amount of carbon emissions involved in their supply chain, and need to be replaced on a fairly regular basis.