Countries like France can’t completely abandon it without leaving themselves vulnerable in a way that Ukraine has learned isn’t wise.

The "Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons" line always neglects to include how the weapons were under the authority of the military of the USSR. Not the Ukrainian local militia.

It's akin to saying "Fidel Castro shouldn't have surrendered nukes for Cuba". They weren't his to surrender. They were Khrushchev's. And he traded the missiles in Cuba to get American missiles out of Turkiye, which moved us away from nuclear war over the long run and benefited civilization universally.

France's nuclear program is owned and operated by the national government. This is comparatively not true of the UK and Germany, whose nukes are owned and operated by the US. And given the history of France, Germany, and Russia, I would argue that Germany posses the bigger historical military threat than Russia every did. With the rising popularity of the AfD in Germany, this threat may become existential far sooner than anyone in Europe wants to admit.

But nuclear compared to fossil fuel? Yeah split those atoms.

What's crazy about nuclear power relative to coal power is how much we've invested in optimizing the latter since the 1980s relative to the former. Fourth and fifth generation nuclear reactors don't exist outside of France and China in the modern day. Meanwhile, the juice coal plants can squeeze out of tree-fossils and tree-fossil farts is truly remarkable.

Nuclear should be the obvious alternative, but we've let the science atrophy for decades. That's why countries across the Pacific continue to build new coal plants at a rapid clip, while nuclear new-start construction languishes.