We need an energy policy that produces energy not one that wastes workers’ time.

Then you need several thousand people (both engineers and support staff) per utility in a central engineering organization. The 3 reactor vendors themselves have about 10K people each in engineering organizations, and then probably about 10K people each in their fuel fabrication organizations. The US NRC has about 1200 people right now just working on the current 100 operating reactors, and the licensing of new reactors. This does not include the inspectors, researchers, or materials regulators. I believe that NRC staffing in FY06 was around 3200 people, and that is supposed to grow to close to 4000 to support the new reactor licencing.

Then there are the various suppliers, but it is difficult to apportion people at a steel company among different users of their products. The current controlling path for nuclear plant construction is heavy-section steel forgings, which can only be made in one factory in Japan, which also probably makes these parts for lots of other industries. It would be nice if someone in the US would restart a similar facility, but without some sort of guarantee that they will be in operation for a long time, I doubt that it will happen.

I think that the bigger question is where they are going to find people to do the sort of work that is needed to maintain these alternative energy systems. It will not be high-paid engineers, but instead low-paid maintenance workers, to clean the surfaces of solar panels, and to cut the grass around windmills. There might be some expensive jobs to do maintaining off-shore wind, but they will not necessarily pay well, because if they do, the price of the energy will go too high.

We have a hard time right now trying to find people do these sort of jobs in areas like agriculture, so where are we going to find them to take care of solar panels?

If you do the math, you see that to achieve 20% wind power as outlined in pickens plan, you need ~500,000 MW of wind-turbine installed capacity. That translates to ~30,000 jobs.

For comparison’s sake, you can estimate that you would need to build 100 nuke plants of 1000MW capacity to generate 20% of American electricity. Such a plant would employ ~500 people. That translates to ~50,000 jobs required.

Scaling up to 100%, we could estimate that the ceiling for power production jobs is about 500,000, which is just a skosh over the current number. Thus the net, new jobs is 100k, and a full order of magnitude lower than the mayors estimate.