Nuclear is not available now in the sense that you can order a plant and have it running in a year or two like you can with solar. More like a decade
Coal is available, but more expensive than natural gas. Coal is dead, did you really not know that?
>Utility-scale battery farms of the magnitude necessary are not.
But rapid progress is being made, and the utilities are planning for the future, which is only rational.
The interesting aspect is that by the time a nuclear power plant is online renewable energy and battery storage might have advanced enough to make it uneconomical.
How is it we're more concerned with wasting some money than the possibility of catastrophic climate change? This is why the federal government should be more involved with combating climate change - nobody is willing to risk their money, or their power bill going up, even if it means essentially saving the world and/or our way of life.
Capturing carbon from coal power plants adds cost to something that is already not cost effective. Capturing carbon in the atmosphere likely will require huge amounts of power - and if its not 100% renewable power its kind of pointless.
Nuclear is better than coal or natural gas, but there have been some high profile failures lately and the lead time on new nuclear is so high, as well as the sticker price.