In the winter of 2022, France had to restart permanently shut down coal plants[0] and pump gas to Germany[1] for electricity because of a pipe crack that made half of their nuclear plants go into maintenance. Note that this was on top of curtailing energy use (funny enough, because of gas, not nuclear[2]).

You could say "that was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of event!" (I'd love to have machine without flaws but nuclear fusion would be faster) but, if it wasn't for the European grid, this could have resulted in prolonged emergency saving measures or possibly a (partial) blackout. Nuclear power is often touted as the stable one, but ironically, solar and wind would not suffer from this kind of problem because they are inherently variable in output. If energy storage for renewables was already a headache, imagine an energy storage system for nuclear.

[0]: https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-france-climate-an...

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230114183054/https://www.nytim...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240709121249/https://www.nytim...