Agreed that pricing in carbon externalities is a necessary step, but that will only make solar / wind / hydro more attractive with respect to natural gas. My point was more that the reasons that the coal industry is dead is that natural gas won exclusively on short-term economic thinking with zero contemplation of externalities.
I'm more concerned about nuclear being more attractive wrt natural gas, since huge low-carbon nukes are getting shut down right after coal to be replaced with fracked natural gas. This is backwards from a climate change perspective.
Damn fracking pulled the bottom out of electricity prices, screwing over nuclear plants whose O&M is pretty high. They were fine when electricity revenue was normal. But fracking dropped it off.
There was pretty much nothing going on in terms of nuclear power development in the US between 1990 and 2008 or so, and Watts' Bar is the only reactor to come online in the US in the last 25 years. Fracking wasn't the cause of that lull.
People stopped building new reactors in that time but they were also doing license extensions and operating and making good money. Today they are shutting down early in deregulated markets because natural gas brought electricity revenue below O&M costs.
