> China has been scaling back and delaying their nuclear program in favor of renewables since Fukushima.

Not "has". "Had". The whole world held their breath after Fukushima.

Now that everybody knows that nothing really consequential happened apart from state overreaction, Japan, China and the rest of the world are no longer holding their breath.

China has been approving 10 or more nuclear power plants per year the last couple of years. Given the lifetime of 80 years of modern nuclear reactors and Little's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law) that implies an expected fleet size of 800 reactors. At 1.2 - 1.4GW per reactors, that would be slightly above 1 TW of generating capacity, which is enough for 90% of current Chinese electricity production.

> China has invested so much for so long into nuclear technology... And to rebuild the same type of industry in the EU would take the same amount of effort.

You're factually wrong.

China started from 0 but the EU has kept building reactors, the French Areva/EDF finished three advanced 1600 MW reactors just 6 and 2 years ago. They are also building two reactors of the same type in the UK as we speak. The EU has never lost the expertise necessary for building nuclear reactors, they have actually advanced the state of the art since the end of the initial European wave.

Don't be confused by the lack of finished reactors in the EU, 2 of the completed Areva plants are in China and were built for a third of the time and cost of the same type reactors currently under construction in the UK. Therefore:

1. Looking at completed reactors in the EU cannot be used for judging the level of Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) expertise in the EU.

2. Cost overruns in Europe are due to politics and civil engineering chaos there while the EU's NPP expertise is the best in the world.

3. Technology-wise, a new EU buldout of NPPs won't start from zero but from the the very top of the NPP technology ladder.

China strategy is clearly a mix of renewable and nuclear, renewable for bulk and nuclear for baseload.

At the moment, they are quickly building gaz-fired capacity to supplement the renewable during peak demand and when production is low. Their base load is mostly coal. Nuclear will allow them to phase out most of that. They are clearly targeting zero coal and are gaz poor anyway so nuclear allows them to limit their exposure to imports. That's basically France strategy in the 70s except France went all in while China can use renewable for bulk capacity as they produce a ton of the required mineral themselves

The opposition between intermittent and nuclear doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to run a grid purely on intermittent sources.

A lot of the discussion on statistics here don't make sense. China wants to switch off coal and gaz. You are looking at transition numbers focusing on current shares when you should be considering trajectories.

nameplate capacity of different generation sources can't be compared, if only because capacity factor is not comparable.