New Orleans could leverage its energy position among American cities to become the number one Nuclear City in America. Floods and hurricanes are not a problem for nuclear energy technology. Waterford Three rode out the storm with little trouble on its 11 foot thick concrete foundation. It didn't even need a levee.

Asia is going nuclear. Look at the reactor orders. Over 77 new plants are being built worldwide. The US has ordered 6. Most of the orders are coming from China, India, Korea and Japan. They can read the tea leaves. The price of oil is high and not likely to drop soon. Windmills and ethanol will not quench the world's growing energy appetite. Conservation leads to the Malthusian solution. CO₂  production will become more problematic. From the day fire was tamed we've been in an energy crunch and technology has always been the solution.

Too expensive you say? Westinghouse thinks it can build its Advanced PWR, the AP1000 for as little as $1,000,000,000 for a 1 GW reactor.

Of course we can make it more expensive. Court cases, legislation and regulatory mandates all added to the delays that killed the US industry in the 1980's.

New Orleans hosts Entergy, the world's leading nuclear operations company. This relationship needs to be nurtured and expanded, not marginalized in a petty dispute over a few hundred million of distribution system rebuilding expenses.

As the number one gas hub in America (the Henry Hub et al), New Orleans is ideally positioned to become the primary hydrogen distribution hub in the country.

Nuclear reactors are the best sources of the high temperature process heat needed to produce hydrogen.

Salt domes could provide geologically stable repositories for spent fuel. This is a problem that has not been solved world wide.

Local universities are searching for ways to reposition their curricula. UNO is already one of the top maritime centers in the country, why shouldn't it become the top nuclear engineering center.

Money is available now to get this started. We have an historic opportunity to do something more than a few casinos. Lets anticipate a big market and fill its needs. We will get rich. We know energy and we ought to be providing it to the nation.

If we really worked hard at it we could probably even teach our nation's leadership how to pronounce the word nuclear (it is nu-cle-er not nuc-u-ler).