France is doing so well that during last November's cold snap they were considering cutting power to industry and rolling power outages for the population becau

France is doing so well that during last November's cold snap they were considering cutting power to industry and rolling power outages for the population because too many of their ancient, brittle nuclear power plants were out of commission and the import capacity from neighbouring countries was at its limit. http://www.reuters.com/article/france-power-winteroutlook-idUSL8N1D92V1 http://www.reuters.com/article/france-power-winteroutlook-id... (Reuters claims that there wasn't enough spare capacity in Germany; in fact the transfer capacity of ~2 GW was the limiting factor; http://www.iwr.de/news.php?id=32860 http://www.iwr.de/news.php?id=32860) For what it's worth, I think the temperatures improved before the more drastic measures had to be implemented. And of course people are free to argue that taking those French plants down for review was an overreaction by an overly critical nuclear regulation regime.