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Problem is, without nuclear power, they will have to resort to generating power from natural gas instead of using that gas for heating, which will in turn have problems compound.

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Right now gas plants are running to stabilize the grid in France...

That may be true, but that's orthogonal to the entirely home-made problems Germany is facing right now. While not a complete solution, using the remaining nuclear plants is an obvious stopgap measure to at least alleviate those problems in the short term.

Uh, as far as I know, that's forever been the case? Nuclear is too slow to react to events, so we always need some safety margin that gas can provide?

France's issues with nuclear are long lasting. They are running only 24 out of 56 power plants today and a lot of that outage is ongoing for many months. France is a net importer for almost a year I believe which is untypical for the country which normally exports cheap nuclear electricity.

Yes, France's current situation fucking sucks. However my answer was for this message:

> Right now gas plants are running to stabilize the grid in France...

As far as I know, gas plants have always been used to stabilize grid in France.

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