The French energy sector is more than 50% fossil [1]. If France decarbonizes over the next decades, it will be due to renewables, not nuclear. While the government and population have been extremely pro-nuclear for a long time, the economics just don't work out. The current plan is to barely build enough reactors to replace old ones going off-line over the next decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France

Yep. Once people experience true hardship like having to keep their house just above freezing in the winter due to the cost of energy - all of a sudden impossible things become quite possible.

The only potential issue here would be if the west had collectively hollowed out its manufacturing base so much as to make surging capacity and capability a generational thing vs. immediate.

Coasting on past success eventually brings stagnation and pain. Hopefully the pain isn’t too horrible for normal folks this time around.

And now Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 14 years late. Online but not commercially operational.

Their EPR2 fleet are getting an enormously large subsidy at 11 cents kWh CFD for 40 years and interest free loans. Sum freely. With the first reactor online in 2038 of everything goes to plan.

How many trillions in subsidies should we handout to new built nuclear power to ”try for real”?

Or we can just build renewables and storage which is the cheapest energy source in human history.

Do we? I see plenty of complaints about high electricity prices and criticism of shutdown of nuclear reactors

> Right now China is building reactors at 6-7 years per reactor.

Thats China. In Europe, this building speed isnt going to happen anytime soon. The knowledge to build nuclear at that scale isn't in the coutry/continent anymore. You'd have to reteach an entire generation of engineers.

Besides that, part of the point of switching away from oil and gas is at least some independence. Europe isnt known for its nuclear fuel supply so now you're reliant on another country again.

Yes, most solar is produced in China but its about as low maintence as it gets and there is still enough knowledge to produce in Europe.

You are right to point out the astonishing developments in Chinese nuclear reactors technology most people are totally oblivious of. It has been standardized, is seemingly safe and far more efficient due to Chinese technological advancements; however you may be overlooking that the ability, the capacity to do that, to do what France did by installing 56 nuclear reactors due to the last oil shock, takes an industrial capacity that does not seem to really exist anymore in Europe to the same degree. I won’t even get into why that is, because it would simply turn into a book, but suffice to say, it’s a euphemistic, polite “challenge”, so to say.

But people also forget that it still takes nuclear fuel to do any of that, which France/Europe has now also largely lost access to, due to the Niger situation along with cutting itself off from Russia/BRICS. That will at some point become an issue for France/Europe, which the “remilitarizing” EU may even make one of its first contrived America-style military adventures to “protect democracy” or some other manipulative, emotive, contrived lie by the lying Epstein, Mandelson, Brunel Class.

It sure does look like Niger really could use some democracy, don’t you? Their women can’t even show off their orifices for money on Onlyfans! Oh, they happen to have rich uranium ore, well isn’t that just an odd coincidence of doing good by sharing Our Democracy©, as decreed by the unelected EU Commission.

Fun fact: Germany blew up its nuclear energy capacity with voted approval by the current EU Commission President von der Leyen, while she was in the German government ruling coalition … she has described that her own action as a “strategic mistake”. That is who is basically the dictator of Europe, someone who makes self-described “strategic mistakes” of the highest order, multi-generational, rippling, echoing, de facto permanently consequential mistakes.