"France is heavily dependent on nuclear power for its electricity needs, while Germany is planning to shut down its last three reactors this year and until recently relied strongly on imports of Russian gas."
The history of nuclear power in France is full of myths and misunderstandings.
There was a plan in France to replace all coal oil and gas with nuclear and build 170 nuclear power stations. In the end, 56 got built - as a result largely of another war, the 1973 Yom Kippur War - almost all not to French design but to Westinghouse designs and all relying on imported uranium.
Maybe only a third of planned got built, but the French nuclear program was a huge success and resulted in large overcapacity, which was sold to Germany and thus Germany and France from an energy point of view became intertwined.
Then the Greens, Fukushima and Chernobyl caused a turnaround in nuclear policy, with France joining Germany, Germany to decommission all its plants by 2022 and France to drop from 75 to 50% nuclear by 2025.
This is the reason why half of France's nuclear power plants today are out of action and many fear restoring operations is impossible because of a loss of staff with the knowledge to maintain and run France's nuclear infrastructure.
But the French now have this plan to bring back online one nuclear power station a week ...
*The station was designed by the French (P'4 design). It has two pressurized water reactors. The plant has two 178.5-metre-tall cooling towers that draw water from the Garonne to compensate for evaporation - it is a closed cooling loop, meaning water is never released back into the river.
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Keep it clean, keep it lean