> France is self sufficient

Actually, not currently. A combination of regulator-mandated nuclear plant stops, scheduled nuclear plant maintenance and fossil plant closures means that France currently relies on importing a lot currently.

Your statement is true generally, but France's situation currently contributes to high energy prices.

For cooking induction plates are much more efficient, transferring 90% of the energy as opposed to ~50% with gas stoves. Together with a gas plant efficiency of ~50%, they comes close in efficiency.

Gas stoves still come out on top price-wise, but part of that are asinine taxes, where gas is taxed less than electricity.

Or when their nuclear power plants boil their rivers...

Are there closed loop reactor designs that don't need to dump heat into a body of water?

Thermodynamics says that it needs to dump heat somewhere, but maybe they can dump it into the atmosphere instead using hyperboloid cooling towers.

Those are huge though (at least "natural draft" ones are) and usually made of concrete, and making the concrete currently requires lots of carbon emissions.