"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.
Compare and contrast to the stats for 2013, when solar power made up just 0.16% of overall electricity generation and a negligible 0.96% of residences were fitted with PV systems.
The UK and NL are time zone neighbours, so I'd argue solar energy / duration are close also. Apparently the sun keeps shining in winter or with overcast skies regardless.
Initially I also had my doubts, but it seems we've got solar everywhere before the nuclear power mega projects are done with construction.
For instance the Netherlands generated 33% electricity from solar during July 2025, but in January 2026 it was only 3%: https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/Netherlands/month In practice, this means that ~70% of the daytime energy use is already generated from solar, and another 30% is wind and nuclear. Adding more solar panels will mostly provide more power during the already-saturated periods.
The Netherlands could, in theory store electricity during the summer and consume it in winter. But actually creating energy storage at that vast scale is beyond our capability, short of some technological breakthrough in energy storage.
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.