1/10 - Winter after winter, as the French nuclear fleet is ageing and its availability decreases, this situation is getting worse. The combined dependency on nuclear power and bad electric heating (up to +30 GW additional load in cold peaks) makes the system highly vulnerable.
https://twitter.com/Sustainable2050/status/1465811466846707713
2/10 - And this is only the beginning. In the next decades, France will face the challenge of maintaining electric security while phasing out its existing nuclear fleet. And meeting high winter peak demand from year to year while shutting down dispatchable nuclear capacity…
3/10 - Plus, this comes at a time when electrifying new uses (mobility, industrial processes) and producing hydrogen through electrolysis is on the decarbonation agenda, which is likely to increase pressure on the demand side.
4/10 - The fact that nuclear capacity to phase out comes by 900 MW at least makes it difficult. The fact that 80% of the 56 French operating reactors are within 10 years of age (34 to 44 years of operation) makes it even more difficult. 
5/10 - As France has ruled out the increased use of fossil gas-fired capacity - to be consistent with its carbon budget objectives, this leaves only two options for replacing this existing nuclear capacity: renewables and new nuclear reactors.
6/10 - Replacing dispatchable nuclear capacity by variable renewable capacity in this context is obviously a challenge, especially regarding the need to deploy flexibility options (flexible demand, storage capacities etc.) at the right pace to keep the system secure.
7/10 - Replacing it by new nuclear reactors creates as much as a risk, although in a different way, especially regarding the high uncertainty on the year when one could be sure to count on this new dispatchable capacity (as the +10 years delay of Flamanville EPR cruelly shows).
8/10 - These combined constraints and risks result in an increasing trend to rely on life extension of the existing reactors, with current plans in the Pluriannual Energy Plan (PPE) to take most of them up to 50 years of operation and a large majority of them beyond.
9/10 - This life extension policy is in turn likely to increase the financial, industrial and technical difficulty to maintain this fleet operating, reinforcing the low-availability issue that France is already facing. The safety of this prolonged operation is obviously at stake.
10/10 - The dire perspective is therefore simple: an increasing reliance on an increasingly unreliable nuclear fleet, with an increasing need for arbitration between nuclear safety (reactors operating under derogatory conditions…) and electric security.
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