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.
But what you have absolutely no concept of is how the electrical system works, nor the scale of energy use in this country.
You could build 100 new nuclear plants tomorrow, and it won't replace even 1 barrel of oil. Oil is used for generation only when and where other sources are not possible (think remote Alaskan villages, cycling or peaking plants positioned either away from gas sources or within metropolitan areas where even the most pro-nuclear person wouldn't suggest building a nuke, emergency diesel plants for hospitals of factories.) Understand this. The US does not rely on oil for power generation. To my knowledge, there is not a single base-load oil-fired plant in this nation. (Nukes, BTW, are all base-load.) The amount of oil used for power generation is infinitesimal compared to the amount used for transportation and petrochemical production. Build all the nukes you want and it will not change the amount of oil we import by a drop.
Without the aircraft, it's a cruise ship with a very large sun deck and very cramped cabins. ;~))
BTW. I'd have to kind of check this out, but I'd bet that the number of barrels of oil required to support a nuclear carrier task force today is far more than the amount required for old WWII vintage oil-fired boilers.
The value of nuclear power carriers is not based on fuel efficiency.