On top of an ongoing natural gas crunch, Europe faces the winter season with reduced nuclear output in France, exacerbating the energy crisis and leaving large parts of the continent praying for a milder winter. France’s EDF stopped on Thursday two nuclear power plants after finding a fault at one during routine maintenance. This brings the total number of nuclear plants out of operation currently at four, which account for 13 percent of the current power availability in France, a major electricity exporter to neighboring countries and to the UK. Nuclear power generates most of France’s electricity. France gets more than 70 percent of its total electricity from nuclear power generation and is a major exporter of electricity, including to the UK. The outage at the French nuclear plants comes just as temperatures in Europe started to fall and amid the ongoing natural gas crunch with gas in storage […]