I have been doing more reading on the bankruptcy of the French nuclear power industry; It's quite an interesting story that makes very little sense. I have to do more reading to understand the overall context, but at this point, for me, a handful of things are pretty clear.
For some currently unknown to me reason, the French government forced EDF to sell power at a massive loss. That ultimately bankrupted the company, and now it's nationalized.
Apparently the industry there has been a financial basket case for years; around 50% of the plants are offline due to maintenance (can't afford it) issues.
The bigger picture is that France did not want to allocate resources to its energy sector, at least while it was in private hands... which it hardly was, it was all but nationalized anyway. Now that it's owned by the government, they plan to waste more resources on nuke plants that will essentially operate "at a loss".
In theory the earnings of the power industry at least partially reflect a real world resource allocation. It takes X resources to produce nuclear power, but France only wants to spend 0.75X or whatever. There's no work around for that and government intervention really doesn't change that issue.
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