France’s nuclear fleet gives it one of the world’s lowest-carbon electricity grids

Which unfortunately now shuts down because the reactors cannot cope with the heatwaves. Turns out that no river = no cooling = no energy production.

Turns out, even when you have to throttle them down slightly due to drought, having a large amount of available nuclear power, like France and Sweden do, means you emit an awful lot less carbon.

Have you read about the Paks NPP? Not throttled, shut down. They even tried sinking barges in the Danube to raise levels enough to keep it going.

And yet, despite that, France still has some of the cleanest electricity in the world with prices in line with the rest of Europe and exported about 10TWhrs of electricity during July.

I agree that downtime is bad, but I don’t think abandoning nuclear to go all in on solar which has a minimum downtime of 50% or wind which has extended periods of <10% is a solution to that. Given that we need electrification to replace fossil fuels in transport and heating over the next few decades to prevent catastrophic climate change, the only reasonable course IMO is to build out as much as possible of nuclear and renewables.