[Retric]

Nuclear has the opposite problem as solar in that it needs high uptime 24/7 to stay reasonably economical. You can easily design a grid following reactor as seen with nuclear subs etc, it just doesn’t save you any money.

24/7 365 grid scale battery backed and thus load following solar runs about 8c/kWh* which is cheaper than nuclear at high utilization. Sure, France’s model of importing and exporting significant chunks of electricity allowed them to ramp up nuclear, but they where exporting power at a loss and utilization still fell into the 80% range.

*Excluding the most northern and southern areas.

[MagnumOpus]

Excluding the most northern areas is a pretty big issue. Most of Europe is north of 45 degrees north... Yes, Hawai'i and California can be supplied with solar panels cheaply; the UK can't.

[Retric]

Can’t is really just a cost question. 8.2 percent of Germany‘a gross-electricity generation comes from PV solar and their southernmost point is 47°17'N. IMO, that was an over investment, but that’s their choice. Most people in Canada live south of that so we are not talking about that many people.

We are really talking about a handful of countries. The Nordic countries have cheap alternatives in hydroelectric, wind and geothermal energy. Nuclear may have a few niche applications for northern islands etc, but that’s not really significant globally.

PS: 4% of the UK’s electricity comes from solar and their southern tip is a actually quite decent for solar.