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Dude, the Enterprise had eight reactors aboard, which did not require refueling for 20 years. The Eisenhower had six, more compact reactors, that operated along the same lines.

In the space between launch and initial refueling, both ships have steamed around the world multiple times and produced God knows how many billions of tons of compressed steam. They heated the water that provided for showers, cooking and maintenance of 5,600 people a day, not to mention launching aircraft 24/7, and all that machinery, 365 days a year for a couple of decades. Those reactors drive a vessel that displaces almost 100,000 tons of water (and several tens of millions of tons in actual weight) across the oceans at speed of 40+ mph. And they've both been refueled only ONCE.

Imagine if those vessels were powered by diesel oil, or compressed natural gas? How much oil or gas do you think that would require? How many cars could be kept on the road or homes heated with the energy created by all that oil that didn't get used?

For someone who claims to be in the nuclear power industry, you seem to be a) very down on your own business. I'd find a new line of work, if you feel that way, and b)incapable of discerning the difference between the energy created by 1 gram of matter (the size of 4 aspirins) and a 5,000 ton trailer truck of gasoline. There is no contest.

For every nuclear plant out there, I'd wager we could close two or three coal-fired or oil burning plants, minimum. We would automatically assume, of course (for the purposes of this argument), that any new plants would be more efficient and have better safeguards than ones built in the 1970's. I would hope we had better trained folks to run them too. In this case, adding newer, more efficient plants that operate on less fuel (and not carbon based, at that!) makes more sense than anything else.

How many billions of barrels of oil would that equate to over the lifetime of the plant? If that ever happened did we reduce the demand for oil or not?