Why nuclear power plants? Because if you want to replace the 250 million cars and light trucks in American which are currently running on gasoline (mostly imported gasoline if you believe T. Boone Pickens) with 250 million cars running on batteries, you have to have a whole bunch of additional electricity generation capacity so when those vehicles get plugged in every night there are enough electrons to re-charge them.
If you want to be able to power all those electric cars without pouring even more crap into the atmosphere from more coal-burning power plants, you have to build nuclear power plants.
Nuclear plants tend to need a rather long lead time as the people who live in the neighborhoods in which they are going to be built generally would prefer to have them built in someone else's neighborhood and so they go to court to make this preference clear to all parties involved.
Also, the Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chu, happens to be a Nobel Prize winning physicist, not a Nobel Prize winning novelist, so you can see where his interests lie.
$36 billion is really a big slush fund to help off-set a climate which may not be as changing as quickly as we had been told. And I think it is fair to ask if there might not be a better use for those loan guarantees than for the construction of nuclear power plants.
At least here in the Washington, DC metro area, this weekend will be one of those rare occasions when those who are believers in climate change and those who are not will be in absolute agreement.
The weather outside is frightful.