You can theoretically. Unfortunately, you are not considering the land difference.

More to the point, the absolute political nightmare of buying and getting permission to use so much land.

It is a nightmare for both. But rare to see the amount of land needed for the power station, have to argue about arable use. Whereas, it's pretty hard in the UK to locate the solar without others claiming land is lost. Farm land mainly as that is the cheap build option. (pricy land, lower labour).

But even brownfield land. Once you have the area to host something like this. You are usually talking about close to populated areas. And just about every NIMBY crap excuse is thrown up about history or other potential use. Meaning, at best you end up with some huge project that takes decades. With a vague plan to add solar generation to the roof.

Honestly I agree. It should be fucking easy to build these plants. Farming should be updating. And honestly can benefit from well-designed solar if both parties are willing to invest and research.

But we have been seeing these arguments for the last 20 years. And people are arseholes, mostly.

And this is all before you consider the need for storage. Again solvable with hydro etc. Theoretically easy. But more land and way way more politics and time. If hydro the cost goes insane. And the type of land become more politically complex. If battery, you instantly get the comparison of mining and transport costs. So again more insane politics.

Then get to work.

But then you don't have power at night. Cost comparisons of renewables vs nuclear very often neglect storage. It is not a trivial cost. Nuclear doesn't perfectly match demand either, but it can provide a baseload.

It's not renewables or nuclear, it's renewables and nuclear.

Building a nuclear plant takes decades.

In China they do it in 6 years...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-construction-time-for-reactors-since-1981/

This is a much more reasonable argument than most.

But third and fourth-gen nuclear are excellent sources of constant energy that don't require storage, and some of which have a tiny percentage of the waste stream of prior generations, and what waste they do produce is problematic along the lines of 400 years (as opposed to 27,000 years).

I concur. Nuclear has had seventy years to compete. Renewable is cheaper and has nowhere near the political hurdles of nuclear.

Thorium Salt reactors can recycle their water source and also use water from waste treatment or even sea water as they're not high pressure water reactors.

When you don't need the result of power generation to be fissionable material for warheads there are a lot more options available to you, such as using the waste from older reactors to generate energy and output much less reactive material.

Nuclear missiles are an albatross around the neck of nuclear power.