[2] France has the largest share of nuclear electricity in the world, and together with renewable energy supplies, this has helped its grid achieve very low carbon intensity.

[8]: 27 [9] France is also the world's second largest producer of nuclear electricity, behind the United States and ahead of Russia and Korea.

According to Al Gore the degree of the government subsidy is difficult to ascertain because of a lack of transparencies in the finances of the operation.

[11] The Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique is the national research body for nuclear power in France, providing RnD and advice to exploiters.

Areva NC (France) and Rio Tinto (UK) are the top uranium companies of the world.

In 2010, as part of the progressive liberalisation of the energy market under EU directives, France agreed the Accès régulé à l'électricité nucléaire historique (ARENH) regulations that allowed third party suppliers access up to about a quarter of France's pre-2011 nuclear generation capacity, at a fixed price of €42/MWh from 1 July 2011 until 31 December 2025.

[16][17] This means that the capacity factor is low by world standards, usually in the high seventies as a percentage, which is not an ideal economic situation for nuclear plants.

Fission products are stored in La Hague facility until a deep geological repository for high-level waste can be constructed.

[21] A number of nuclear power plants were forcibly shut in 2022 due to stress corrosion cracking on pipework providing primary cooling.

This led to EDF to estimate a loss of 70 TWh of production (or around 13% of annual generation) for the year 2022 and a fall in profits of €19 billion.

The share of wind power was in average 8,78%[23] of the electricity production during 2020 with a peak to 32,49%[23] on 27 September 2020.The load factor is estimated at 25%.

[25] The second round of bidding was awarded in 2014 to the Areva / GDF Suez Consortium for the construction of two wind farms (Yeu-Noirmoutier & Dieppe/Le Tréport) and a total installed capacity of 1 GW.

[25] Finally, a third round started in 2016 with the site of Dunkirk being awarded in 2019 the consortium EDF Energies Nouvelles, Innogy and Enbridge.