"Made possible" also meant that coal burning plants were obsolete and we needed to restructure the generating system so they could go out of business without making the utilities go under.

So much in the energy literature looks like a clock that stopped. For instance you still see cost estimates of advanced combustion systems from the 1970s that have been carried into the future without adjusting for inflation and changes in technology.

People still compare nuclear power to coal but they quit building coal plants circa 1980 for the same reason they quit building nuclear plants -- the capital cost of the steam turbine is an order of magnitude more than a gas turbine, so even if you get the heat for free a current generation coal or nuclear plant is going to struggle to compete against the power plants we've been building since the 1980s.