Never let a crisis go to waste. This may be one of the least original thoughts ever. It's been attributed to Niccolo Machiavelli, Saul Alinsky, and Rahm Emanuel among others. As Emanuel explained, a crisis ``is an opportunity to do things you could not do before". Trite but true.

The Federal bureaucracy, specifically the NRC and the EPA, present an insurmountable hurdle to the promise of cheap, reliable, pollution-free, nearly CO2 free nuclear power. They are incapable of change. Congressional prodding with pieties such as the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act is slow walked by the NRC and then turned into even more onerous regulation. The ADVANCE Act if passed will have the same fate. Congress suborned by well endowed, wind/solar lobbies is not about to do anything that would make a real difference.

But this will change. Under the present deranged policy of promoting intermittent sources and discouraging dispatchable sources, it is only a matter of time before the nation suffers a string of debilitating brown outs and black outs. Congress will suddenly wake up to the fact that those lobbyists may have oodles of money, but they represent maybe 5% of Americans. The other 95% will be pissed.

The political beasts will be desperate to do something to keep feeding at the public trough. We must be in position to tell them what.