[panick21_]

And France having maintenance issues is in large part because of the anti-nuclear campaign that increasingly started to attempt to move away from nuclear. For a while even in France they basically just wanted to run the reactors out and switch to renewables.

So the politics goes like this, cause maintenance delay, condemn nuclear for maintenance delay. Seriously, these delays are being handled in a reasonable time-frames and most of the reactors will be back when they are really needed.

Consider that with the age of these reactors, wind-farms would have to be mostly rebuilt to a larger degree.

Also, if we actually made progress on technology then we could have had moved on to air-cooled designs but sadly we can't have nice things.