What if fresh reactor cracks force more of France's EDF fleet offline?
More EDF stress-corrosion outages tighten French nuclear into winter, bidding up TTF/German baseload and pulling EUR/USD lower on a worse terms-of-trade. Rhymes with H2-2022 when EDF's corrosion-driven half-fleet outage forced record French power imports and added to the gas squeeze. France normally exports power to Italy/UK/Germany; flipping to importer drains the whole NW-European pool. Forward angle: gas storage starts fuller than 2022, so the spike is shorter and more weather-path-dependent.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Fresh stress-corrosion cracks found in 2026 inspections force more EDF reactors offline, spiking European power prices. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Natural gas ▲ · European energy ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.