The government should not try to destroy a legal (and vital) industry. Let coal die a natural death, like blacksmithing.
Nuclear can and should replace coal. We should build fast spectrum reactors on the brownfield sites of the coal plants use the existing turbines, power transformers and powerlines. Demo the coal boilers and put in high temp fast spectrum reactors with molten salt storage systems to make them easy to load follow wirh. This is already being done at a coal plant in Wyoming.
Nuclear doesn’t emit any heavy metals or NOx or SOx or particulate matter. People always say what about stack scrubbers that cost $100 million or more. Well stack scrubbers will never be as clean as natural gas and nuclear is even cleaner. Plus spent fuel is 100% contained and stored in a tiny area. Coal not only always puts some pollution into the sky even with $100 million in scrubbers you cannot get away with the ash it creates. Toxic ash that never decays as it’s chemically toxic for all eternity.
Look at the image at the top of the page it’s factual. Then know that 10 to 45% of that mass will end up as ash of less density.
One storage cask stops the generation of a huge amount of coal ash. Every gram of that ash is toxic and also contains more radioactive released to the environment than nuclear power would release by a million times. Coal ash is just piled up and allowed to leach into the watershed when not if the coal ponds leak they all will leak eventually.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/144mm6e/each_nuclear_waste_cask_can_prevent_4_billion_lbs/
Then think that 95% of the spent fuel in Th at single cask is still fuel when reprocessed so with reprocessing and fast reactors it’s 100 to 1 more energy so that coal pile grows by nearly 99 times larger for the same energy output.
This comes back to my point of you can burn coal once to the sky or you can use it to make concrete and steel for a reactor and get back thousands of times the energy per BTU invested. Same for natural gas burn it once in a turbine and it’s gone forever or burn it in a steel furnace and concrete kiln to make reactor parts again with 1000+ to one return on energy invested. Solar is well over 100 to one in sunny climates and wind is 40 to 100 in class 5 to 8 wind fields respectively. This is how humans should burn coal and natural gas to make things of value That return much more energy than it took to create them.