Leak closes French nuclear plant  

"Its important to remember that nuclear power is also intermittent - it just tends to go offline for different reasons than renewables."

Bzzzzzt!

Ooops. Wrong. It's not a nuclear power plant that was halted. It's the effluent treatment plant of an enrichment facility, the George Besse diffusion plant.

There are four nuclear power plants next to that facility, which provide power to the diffusion plant but also to the general grid. Hence the confusion by the journalists, who, as usual with nuclear, don't know what heck they writing about.

The power plants are running just fine. No kWh was harmed in the making of that leak.

Checking later reports it appears you are correct.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24006678-1702,00.html

Apparently there is also a weapons facility in the same complex.

In any case, personally I'd rather not have uranium in my drinking or fishing water.

Oh - it doesn't actually change my point that nuclear power is intermittent - just that this particular safety incident isn't an example of it.

It was only a few weeks ago that Sizewell B (the largest reactor ion the UK) went down completely, for example.