BTW. The only reason for the Eisenhower to even exist is to be floating airfield. Now tell me, did you plug in real long extension cords into those jets? Or did each of those jets go through more fossil fuel in one flight than the average driver will use in a year? The fact is, an aircraft carrier (the aircraft is the operative term) uses more fossil fuel than any other ship in the fleet. And how about all your escort vessels in the carrier task force? What did they run on, spare protons from one of your 8 reactors?
As to Chicago, it in fact has been lit by nuclear power for more than 25 years, by those old 70s nuclear plants you don't care for like Dresden, Byron, Braidwood, LaSalle, and good old Zion which is now decommissioned. Just in the Chicago area, there is more nuclear generation capacity than every nuke power ship in the US Navy. But nuclear doesn't do a damn thing to move those cars around the Loop or get those jets off the ground at O'Hare.
We agree on the price of gas. At $2.50, it's cheaper in real dollars now than it was back when I started driving. And considering that demand has probably tripled since then, you should thank some greedy lazy, stupid, self-centered Boomer engineers who figured out how to find, drill, transport, refine and distribute all that oil at a fraction of the cost that it once took.
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.
I said I am in 100% support for more nukes, and you read that as being "down". Do you have comprehension problems? And again, what does the energy potential of nuclear fuel have to do with the demand for oil?
For every nuclear plant out there, I'd wager we could close two or three coal-fired or oil burning plants, minimum.
Virtually all the coal-fired plants built since the 1960s are approximately the same size as nuclear plants --- i.e. about 20 times more generation capacity as your aircraft carrier had. As to oil burnings plants, there ain't many. Only 3% of US electricity is generated from oil, and the vast majority of that is in locations where other generation options are not viable technically or economically. Utilities aren't stupid. They don't burn oil when they could make juice cheaper with other fuels.
So for you to spout that 1. your aircraft carrier could power Chicago for 25 years, and 2. that more nukes will cause a decrease in oil demand, shows me that the navy didn't teach you squat about the nation's energy supply.
More nukes would be a good thing because they are the cheapest way to make electricity, and cheep electricity is a good thing. But they do absolutely nothing to change oil use.
Okay, one more time. It's simple math, so I don't see how you're missing it.
If you have a plant that burns 100,000 barrels of oil a year (for example), that translates into 1.2 milion barrels per year, correct? How much power is produced for that 1.2 million barrels is irrelevant for the moment.
Now let's say the operational life of that plant, not counting modifications and maintenance made after initial construction, is 30 years.
1.2 million barels of oil x 30 years = 36,000,000 barrels of oil.
So far are you following me? Good.
Now, let's say there was nuclear power plant of approximate size and output. However, instead of burning oil, it "burns" little pellets of uranium, and has the same service life as the oil-fired plant.
That's 36,000,000 barrels of oil that are not requred for that one plant alone. Multiply that by 100 or 1,000 and it begins to add up. That's a lot of oil that is not being used to generate electricity. How's that for reducing demand?
Of course, that's only the industrial and power-generation side. Your counter-argument would be to dance around the word "demand". As in "reduce demand in one sector and it rises in another". I.E. once we stop using oil for electiricty, people will just drive more.
If you want to make the case that once electricity is generated cheaply, cleanly and oil free that people will now take advantage of falling oil prices to drive 24 hours a day, you're making the assumption that because something is more readily available that people will always take advantage of it. And perhaps they would here, until all that cheap power made alternate forms of transportation more palatable than sitting in traffic jams half the day.
The real demand problem is in the more rural areas of the country that do not have access to mass transit or which are a long way from anything. In those areas, demands for oil and gasoline will continue to increase until civilization makes the great leap forward into Webbedfoot, Idaho and Inbred City, Montana.
And I never said that airplanes were nuclear powered, did I? Please be serious. All I said was that thanks to the nuc plant, we did not have to burn oil or gas in order to make all those other things happen. It also meant we didn't have to have tankers sailing around to top us off. Yes, the aircraft are a different story, but the ship itself was incredibly energy efficient. And those reactoirs, btw, were cycled through. While two were in use, the rest were offline for maintenace, etc. if all six of them were fired up at once, there was more than enough power to go around for a very long time.