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One issue is that the French nuclear reactors are badly designed. Areva, the French manufacturer, makes HUGE reactors that require extremely large construction equipment. The size of the reactors creates vendor lock-in. Failures can be far more dangerous.

Construction and maintenance is much easier when there are multiple smaller reactors. See, for example, Small Nuclear Power Reactors.

Since the CEA is a French public institution, this makes the French states owning more than 80% of Areva http://www.areva.com/EN/financ...

"The government of France, the world's most nuclear dependent country, has a 29% stake in Areva"

Not according to Areva it hasn't.
http://www.areva.com/EN/financ...

"Today, public sector holdings (CEA, the French state and CDC) of group capital has risen close to 87%. 4% of AREVA’s share capital is float."

The French have a peculiar way of privatizing stuff. It sort of looks like the companies are private, but the state still ultimately owns them. And all these "private" companies are acting like global players. The problem is whose money are they playing with?

http://www.areva.com/EN/operat...
http://www.neimagazine.com/new...

Supply must match the demand curve, and no method of power generation does that by itself, including coal and nuclear..

Overstated.

It is in fact possible to run nuclear plants in load following mode. France, which generates around 80% of its electricity from nuclear does it.

It's one of the design features of the EPR to be able to vary its output with demand:

between 60 and 100% nominal output, the EPR reactor can adjust it power output at a rate of 5% nominal power per minute at constant temperature, preserving the service life of the components and of the plant.

http://www.areva.com/EN/global-offer-419/epr-reactor-one-of-the-most-powerful-in-the-world.html

http://www.areva.com/EN/operations-1572/assets-of-the-epr-nuclear-reactor.html

http://www.areva.com/EN/operations-3024/nuclear-used-fuel-processing-reduction-in-the-volume-of-waste.html

This plant has 2 production lines with a current capacity corresponding to electricity production of 450 tWh per year (1,700 tons of used fuel per year). Almost 929 tons were treated there in 2009.

It isn't practical to rapidly change the load on nuke reactors

AREVA, the makers of the EPR, would disagree.

Load follow: between 60 and 100% nominal output, the EPRâ reactor can adjust it power output at a rate of 5% nominal power per minute at constant temperature, preserving the service life of the components and of the plant.

src: http://www.areva.com/EN/global-offer-419/epr-reactor-one-of-the-most-powerful-in-the-world.html

Since this is a 1650MWe reactor, 5% is over 82MWe/minute slew rate between 990 - 1650MWe load. To myself at least, that is quite high ability to follow load.

Load following is important if you want to incorporate renewables to any extent into the power grid. Going full steam ahead all the time (no pun intended) causes unnecessary wear-and-tear on equipment like steam turbine and pumps and also burns fuel, though very cheap.

Old reactors are not very good at load following because they were not designed for that purpose. That does not preclude nuclear reactors from being able to follow the unreliable supply of most renewables.

PS. France is not the only nation investing in nuclear. Canada, Russia will be building new reactors. There will be new reactors in eastern Europe. China and India have MAJOR builds in progress and planned. US will have to start replacing its current fleet soonish but I suspect nothing will happen until natural gas spikes within a few years.

This is probably going to be more like 1 billion Euros for Areva. As others have said at least some first world country will be developing the next generation nuclear reactors.

The French do reprocessing at COGEMA La Hague. Since the wikipedia page says they treated 1100 tons in 2005, I will have to assume they still pretty much do it.

The Japanese still send their spent fuel to France for separation to create MOX fuel. The Japanese are in the process of ramping up their own separation facility at Rokkasho. I even remember an accident report a couple of years back in Japan, of some worker handling MOX fuel. So I know someone is actively doing reprocessing to some degree even inside Japan...

The Japanese are highly interested in such projects because of their lack of strategic material deposits, including uranium.

In the long term these technologies will be developed. The advantages of cheaper uranium and plutonium separation are too large to ignore. These techniques are useful for both electric power generation and weapons manufacturing. Nuclear power could replace coal, and even natural gas for electricity generation.

You could use high temperature nuclear reactors to get the temperatures necessary to generate cheap hydrogen using the sulfur-iodine process, displacing another use of natural gas, the manufacture of ammonia.

Then you could use the natural gas to generate synthetic diesel fuel using gas to liquid plants, such as the one build by Sasol at Qatar.

Just wait for Italy to switch nuclear. Just wait...

the present government in Italy is committed to allow construction of nuclear power plants in italy, probably on the framework of the finnish nuclear plant. The biggest italian utility has a stake in the french prototype of the EPR reactor.
Italy, and especially Piedmont, the region I live in, is in the unique situation of having dismantled its own nuclear reactors, while being downwind from France and its nuclear plants, by which it imports about half of the 12% of the total electricity needs it imports from abroad.
Italy is a kyoto treaty signatory, and strange as it may seem, nuclear is cheap if you signed that piece of paper, especially in respect to Solar and wind. Here's the link, in italian, of the government's intentions towards nuclear investment.

http://www.areva.com/

They advertise for atomic energy on TV a LOT...