But all the nuclear power bros told me electricity in France is uber reliable and bountiful because it's all nuclear! We need nuclear power plants for a stable grid!

It's almost like grid inertia is a different problem from matching changes in demand, and nuclear really sucks at the latter...

Putting computer systems on UPSs isn't a Europe thing. Backup generators and UPS units are very common, or at least they were until everyone got infatuated with moving all their data "into the cloud" and stopped maintaining, or building, infrastructure in office space for it.

Now everyone has all their eggs in the Amazon/Microsoft/Google basket, and instead of the (ahem, regulated) telco or electric company going out...the cloud provider does, and unlike before where you could still work locally - now you can't do anything.

But hey, it was cheaper, right?

Oops...