Another factor is the fact that they are working at night. And Europe is further to the north than California, nights has a tendency to get much longer in winter (up to 16 hours of night in Central Europe), so cheap energy from solar panels is instantly nullified by lack of sunshine during winter, when the energy is needed the most.

>(up to 16 hours of night in Central Europe)

Poland gets on average 1 hour of actual sunshine in December. I'll take nuclear power unless somebody really has reasonable strategy for getting 3-7 days of energy storage.

You need an energy storage solution for nuclear too, unless you want to heavily overbuild, which raises it from too expensive to stupid expensive.

And once you have that storage, a mix of renewables is cheaper.

> You need an energy storage solution for nuclear too, unless you want to heavily overbuild, which raises it from too expensive to stupid expensive.

Why do you energy storage for nuclear? As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, where 8-9 GW of nuclear power chugs along continuously:

* https://www.ieso.ca/en/Power-Data

I'm not sure what needs to be stored. We just bring online hydro and gas as needed (along with having fluctuating wind).

Hydro and gas both involve storage (of water and methane), and both can be, and are, used with renewables and/or nuclear to fill gaps between supply and demand.

> You need an energy storage solution for nuclear too, unless you want to heavily overbuild, which raises it from too expensive to stupid expensive.

No, nuclear lowers baseline you need. If 50% of your energy is produced by nuclear, you just need to build the rest like your country is 50% smaller.

In a capitalist system of electricity markets, things which are valuable have to be turned into prices to make them happen.

(France's big nuclear build out was extremely socialist planned economy, only later privatized as EDF)

EDF is a state company owned by French state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_Franc...

For ones too lazy to open the Wikipedia page, it was state owned since its inception.

Founded 1946; 77 years ago

Founder French state under the direction of Provisional Government Minister for Industrial Production Marcel Paul

Nationalized last week due to the hole they dug for themselves using nuclear power.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-giant...

> In a capitalist system of electricity markets, things which are valuable have to be turned into prices to make them happen.

Some things are mandated regardless of what they cost (reliability regulations, or lack thereof). Just ask Texas:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Groundhog_Day_blizzard#Te...

Reliability to most people is a property of the system, not of the power plant.

Meaning, I don't care whether the power I'm getting got made by a power plant that can keep going 24/7, or sometimes gets supplemented by a battery, or there's some constant delicate balancing act going on between 5000 distributed sources.

So as a consumer I don't really care that nuclear is stable and solar isn't, the output of the grid is all that matters.