I think that there is an exception if a nation wants to have a nuclear industry complement and partially amortize the production of nuclear weapon.

The subsidies in France led to the absurd situation that electric heating is much more prevalent than anywhere else, even though renewable electricity is supposedly more heavily subsidized.

That's not an absurd situation, that's making France way ahead of other European countries for the carbon footprint of heating, it would be nice if other countries could catch up.

And renewables were not even a thing at that time anyways.

Currently the situation in France is that the nuclear energy is made artificially more expensive to fund renewables with the goal of increasing the renewable share but even with that market distortion, renewables are still failing to compete.

In reality, heating with natural gas is more carbon efficient currently, than using most commonly available electricity mixes. Cheaper, in any case, than heating with nuclear electricity anywhere but in France. Of course you can make a case where nuclear power is cheaper, if you disregard any of the risks, political problems, and clean-up costs associated with it. Particularly in France, all those costs are covered (or mostly ignored) by the government. The private energy companies certainly can't pay it.

France still has to import electricity from coal power, so the carbon footprint isn't that great in any case. And you can't claim that slightly raising electricity costs offset the dozens of billions that went into the French nuclear sector in any way.

> Particularly in France, all those costs are covered (or mostly ignored) by the government.

That's an argument constantly repeated by the anti-nuclear activists, it's of course totally false, there's extensive (100+ pages) reports every few years on all the external and primary costs.

> France still has to import electricity from coal power, so the carbon footprint isn't that great in any case. And you can't claim that slightly raising electricity costs offset the dozens of billions that went into the French nuclear sector in any way.

That's not true in any way but if you are concerned about that, you can check https://www.electricitymap.org for other EU countries (this takes into account import as well). Most of them (except Scandinavia) are doing 6x to 10x worse than France at the moment and have a very long way to catch up.