Also, before California pats itself on the back too much here, they have been blocking nuclear and hydro for decades, both of which would have reduced their use coal.

Just how much undeveloped hydro potential do you figure for California?

The state's not water-rich to start with. Dams have significant impacts, and virtually all major waterways are already heavily managed.

Nuclear faces safety, fuel, and disposal challenges. The latter for the nex million years.

Fuel availability is ~80 years at present usage, 6 if the world relied solely on uranium-based fission.

Systemic risks of nuclear are distinctly non-negligible, and are not technologically addressable: they concern management, organisation, politics, war, economic stability, and far more.

Solar and wind fare far better on all counts.

You don't see more than 80 year supply for most materials as they have stopped looking because there is more profit in looking for minerals that don't have 80 years of known reserves. If demand rose to where current reserves would last 6 years, people would going out in droves to look for it and developing new tech to find it.

I think most commercial nuclear reactors require craptons of cooling water because they aren't that efficient in fact. (When you use water to regulate fission, the temperature can't get much higher than ~100C.)

So, putting them in the middle of a desert might be problematic.

I wonder if there's any current commercial ones that are more efficient? Theoretically we can greatly improve efficiency by using high-temperature designs, but good luck building an unproven new design of reactor these days...

Don't most nuclear power plants require a water source around for cooling purposes?

Finding such a source in the middle of a desert might be a reason people don't build it there.

There is the Israeli nuclear research plant in the Negev desert, but presumably that doesn't require the kind of continuous cooling you need for a normal nuclear power plant.

France has been known to throttle it's nuclear power generation (they have tons) in the summer because the water in the nearby lakes that they use for cooling gets too hot.

No worries there. By the time coal is deprecated, the price of natural gas will spike, causing renewables to be deployed more quickly with utility scale battery storage.

Lot of fossil fuel generation out there that's going to be left as stranded assets.

The fuel itself (reserves in the ground) is the largest component of that "stranded asset", right?

For the exploration company? Yes. For utilities or independent generators, the generation asset itself is the largest component.

I'm unaware of anyone vertically integrated, where they own the wells, the pipelines, and the generation facility (in the US).