Does this replace the nuke explosion effect? How does this work?

This mod modifies the vanilla nuclear explosion action only slightly. It just contains a few more effects (needed for the mushroom cloud effect). Additionally, it adds a trigger, that will be catched by the mod script in order to play the explosion sounds for every individual player.

Sounds good. Any chance of adding compatibility with atomic artillery?

Yes, compatibility with most of other nuclear weapons mods is planned.

Awesome. Thanks a bunch.

I made a mod with plutonium artillery shells and implemented support for your awesome mushroom clouds by myself. It works fine, but if you change some your references I'd have to adopt my code. I would really appreciate if you could add native support for our mod as well! (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Advanced-Atomics)

No problem, i'll add native mod compatibility for Advanced Atomics in the next version.