The graph in the article makes clear that isn't really true. Around half of coal use was replaced by natural gas in the 1990s, as you say. That's still a win - same energy, but half the CO2 emmisions. But since 2010 or so, the remainder of coal use was largely replaced by renewables.
Now we just need to get rid of the remaining natural gas use. For electricity production, the trend here is pretty good. Natural gas won't disappear anytime soon, but there will be longer and longer periods where none is burned. But for home heating, I don't think gas will be phased out as fast as really needs to be done.
At least it’s still lower on average than renewables at the moment [1]. I’m not sure what the current state of Nuclear Reactor construction is like, but hopefully we get some come online soon.
>No new U.S. nuclear plants are currently being built.
If it was a good idea, plants would be being built. People with much more expertise than us have crunched the numbers and they can’t make it work. It’s too expensive and that’s why there are no new plants being built. No amount of internet proselytizing will change this.
Both politicians and investors are too short-term in their motivations to use their actions to teach us anything.
It's clear the future is unreliable renewable (solar+wind) and batteries, with some pumped/hydro where it is geologically feasible. Because the renewables are so cheap to build, and the cheap renewables cause over-supply and the batteries are a cheap-steadily-getting-cheaper solution to that.
The tipping point comes when we need to start phasing out the base power for overnight and long bouts of bad weather.
So the pricing game to be made is, can nuclear be built cheap enough to compete with batteries for long-term base power?
Most likely to me is that nuclear will survive in places with worse weather (Nordic countries where the sun goes down for 3 weeks in winter) or poor geography (Japan), and sunnier places (like Texas, or most of the US even) will go full renewable+battery.
Actually nuclear has negative growth at this point. There are a lot of aging plants coming up for either closure or expensive investments needed to keep them going a bit longer.
Having worked in the industry, "the renewable crowd" were heavily pro nuclear.
Clean coal, clean gas, carbon capture, and the "nothing bad happens when you burn coal I would happily live next to a coal power plant" crowd are the real issue. That's the grift that keeps on grifting.
That one looks only at carbon emissions, which is not the main issue with Natural gas. The problem is that since it's a gas it leaks and natural gas in the atmosphere is a very very potent greenhouse gas.Though ofcourse over time in will break down to simple co2
