Why energy prices are so high in France if they have nuclear plants that should produce cheap eletricity.
Higher than Poland with 0 nuclear plants, no gas and no coal.
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Part of the reason is that a significant number of nuclear plants are currently under maintenance (so not producing any electricity). To be precise 32 of them are disabled, which is essentially half of the French nuclear plants.
A lot of maintenances that should have happened during Covid were delayed, so now we should have had twice the amount of nuclear plants under maintenance than what was planned. But additionally, bad luck means that this time, actual issues were found during maintenance: multiple corrosion issues (and things I don’t understand enough to talk about), leading to putting other similar plants in maintenance just in case they had the same issue.
Hopefully (if nothing more goes wrong), maintenance will be over before the winter and almost every plant will be operational to avoid the worst case scenario (28 out of the 32 should have finished their maintenance by the end of the year).
So yeah, any other year, nuclear plants would have allowed for cheaper electricity (up to the whole mess that EU power grid and regulated market).
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