And by doing so, we produce twice as much CO2 per capita as France or the UK. While having one of the most expensive electricity in Europe, because we pay a huge "renewable energy tax".
https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/overview-...
The UK imports a bunch of this cheap nuclear electricity from France, we have a 2GW bi-directional line. In principle that line could sell power from our gas turbines in mid-winter if France needs the extra power to keep things running, but most of the time it imports French nuclear power because it's much cheaper than our gas. Our own nuclear fleet is too small for our base needs (6-7GW of nukes compared to ~18-20GW base)
Luckily, they'll finally be decommissioned now as France turns towards renewables: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-france-nuclear-reactors-macron...
But that's the price we pay for rapidly switching off all our nuclear plants and heavily subsidizing low efficiency inland wind farms.
That's the result of too much ideology in energy politics.
I think it's less about being scared and more about the eye-watering cost of storing waste responsibly.
So basically by building renewable we are reducing nuclear power's viability on the grid. Since there does not seem to be viable storage option (if there was we'd be building that instead of gas power plants everywhere), running only on renewable is not possible. So I really don't see the point in using renewables as we do when electricity is already low-carbon.