The French have used their nuclear system for 20+ years as a giving tree.

The forced EDF to sell nuclear at very cheap prices to fossil fuel companies and then buy it back at much higher price.

The French forced EDF to give subsides to solar even when that actually hurts their economics.

The French randomly in the 2010s decided to replace nuclear in a short time-frame (completely 100% unrealistic) but it sounds good to politicians. And they decided to delay all maintenance and didn't do any of the upgrades many other nations did.

Once of the secrets of French nuclear is, that their grandfather were so good in providing them these nuclear plants, the french absolutely suck at running them. Other countries like the US and ironically Germany managed to run their reactors at higher factors.

The problem is the solar is cheap when its being produced and makes the economics of base lose worse, without actually solving base load. Solar has been cross subsidized this way for a long time. And has been more explicitly subsidized. But its a private good, it helps only private people, it is negative on a system level.

Once you think on a systemic level, how to provide reliable energy for a whole country, nuclear is not more expensive and France saved a huge amount of money buy doing what they did.

> Why should anyone with solar or storage buy this expensive grid based nuclear electricity?

If somebody privately wants to build solar/storage that's fine, but they should get no support. Also prices should be adjust to actually reflect peak demand. Historically the way the system operated is with much simpler pricing models because it was understood that everybody shares in this infrastructure. In such a situation, the majority of people wouldn't build solar and batteries.

But really, the question we should ask, what the best thing to run a modern economy on and the German solution of 'lets build a massive electricity pipeline to solar farms in Greece' isn't a great model.

All this new energy transfer infrastructure is incredibly expensive. It cost at least as much as the generation itself, and sometimes more.