Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Hence these deals.
Only if you ignore reliability issues with nuclear, such as France having to take a lot of reactors offline at the same time to check for cracks. The comparison has to be fair.
Second, the could have kept those plants operating and taken a more piecemeal approach to fixing the cracks. They shouldn't have, and didn't, because you really want that triple or quadruple redundancy in your cooling systems, but they could have if push had come to shove, the plants were still operational.
But since there was plenty of capacity available, they could afford to take those plants offline and do the checks and repairs all at once.
Intermittent renewables afford you no such optionality.
If the sun don't shine, the sun don't shine.
If the wind don't blow, the wind don't blow.
These cracks are not the only factor for the poor performance on nuclear in 2022 : several reactors had to do their 10-year maintenance (grand carénage), which had been delayed because of the pandemic.
It's hard to extrapolate reliability issues from an event that happened once in 30 years.
German und US plants had/have capacity factors of well over 90%, and the downtimes are scheduled.
The "overbuild" is minimal.
Dayjob is in energy market algo trading and DER ancillary services in EU, and I can tell you with confidence this is far from true.
And when the nukes trip for safety reasons - which happens multiple times per year - that’s a GW that just dropped off the grid from one second to the next.
For me, I much prefer the reliability of wind and solar; never seen a correlated failure, and we know their production pattern days in advance.
How these things will be managed in the real world matters, too, not just how it could play out hypothetically.
