Geopolitics is largely determined by who controls energy resources. We've seen, over and over, how borders between energy producers and consumers are inevitably messy. Nuclear can be built most places. Sun and wind cannot.
Geopolitics and nuclear power are not always such a great combination - consider the Russian occupation of the nuclear power plant in Ukraine. I'm not against nuclear power in general, but saying it's a great hedge against political risks involved with wind and solar is quite a stretch.
Two units cooling for every unit of electricity, at least with PWR/BWR. At a 10 degree C rise it requires about 50ml of water (per second) per kW of electrical power.
Palo Verde NPP in Arizona happens to be in a rather dry area. It uses treated sewage for cooling and is trying to use rather poor quality groundwater too.
If you ever done a tour on a nuclear facility you'd hear about how careful they need to be managing water temperatures in their discharge pools, you don't want a nuke frying off all wildlife on the rivers and/or lakes nearby. You don't want to create massive ponds of still water for cooling, and you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).
Nuclear power plants only really have an effect on the water temperature if they do not have a cooling tower. This makes the plant considerably cheaper, but, as you mentioned, damages the ecosystem.
Only in rare cases, such as during revisions or emergencies, they might be unable to cool the condenser using the tower-coolant-loop. Then they might have to warm up the water temporarily.
> you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).
There is no such failure case that a "discharge needs to happen" for the irradiated water. There is a comparatively tiny amount of deionized and supercleaned water in the reactor that is always cycled around. Even if such a case were to occur (how??), the amount of water would be easy to handle/store.
I mean, classical plants and those based around the regulations that the US currently has on the books thanks to some questionable lobbying in the 60s require large amounts of water, sure.
These are hardly the only viable plant designs that exist. Molten Salt, Pebble Bed, and other designs exist.
China is currently underway building a molten salt cooled Thorium reactor.
Russia has had sodium-cooled reactors [0] for some time. America experimented with them at least back to the 1950s, with the USS Seawolf (SSN 575, not SSN 21) having a sodium-cooled reactor (S2G) for her first few years.
Russia also had lead-bismuth reactors, at least militarily, with the Alfa-class.
Let's stay realistic. You can build as many solar panels as you want in Iceland and you won't get any power from them mid winter. They're not just less effective, they would not be functional for over a month. That's not "everywhere".
