Not the same scenario. First, France came through this just fine.

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.

This event happened in 2022. this is the only year since 1995 where nuclear production fell below 300TWh (278TWh in 2022 vs 360 in 2021 and 320 in 2023).

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.

Well, that's a false dichotomy, because no-one's (at least no-one reasonable and in good faith) is suggesting shifting the grid entirely to nuclear. Instead, a diverse set of generation sources is ideal, including solar, wind, nuclear and hydro.

Dunno, all the nuclear advocates seem to contrast it with wind/solar, which are also much cheaper and quicker capital investments.

Well, the point of this thread is that's only true until a sufficient level of availability is required, and then nuclear (and fossil thermal plants) all of a sudden become a viable option again.

Why did they have to be checked all at once? That sounds like a design or regulation problem.