Nuclear power or global warming?

What a dilemma: the very technology that is so despised by much of the environmental lobby is increasingly being touted as the planet's great green hope, the Nelson Mail said in an editorial on Monday.

If the climate change alarmists are right - and accelerating glacial melts and other evidence are mounting to support them - then the world's future would seem to depend on moving urgently to "clean" power generation technologies. Top of the list, according to some world leaders at the Apec summit in Sydney, is nuclear power.

It is easy to be cynical about the motives of Kyoto party-poopers George Bush and John Howard in attempting to hijack the climate change debate. The two very good friends have refused to join the United Nations-led greenhouse club, partly because it lets developing countries off the hook but also because meeting its targets could derail their own countries' economies. Speculation about Bush administration connections in the nuclear power industry is rife. Raising the nuclear power bogey has potential to boost dissent among Kyoto signatories and underlines the determination of Mr Bush and Mr Howard to operate outside of the UN agreement. However, the push for nuclear power instead of smoke-spewing coal-fired generators, particularly in the likes of emerging superpower China, is a serious issue that needs to be considered.

New Zealand's Labour Party has at its core an antipathy for all things nuclear. Domestically, economically and politically, this is an easy position to maintain. Despite growing difficulties in getting new hydro-electric projects through the convoluted planning hoops, New Zealand is blessed with energy options and a comparatively small population. Not so the likes of China and India or even Australia, which faces a period of sustained drought - which can only get worst under the climate change scenario - but is rich in the uranium vital in current nuclear technology. Mr Howard, who has just announced an agreement with Russia to sell uranium to it, says nuclear energy in Australia is inevitable. Though disastrous accidents at nuclear reactors in Chernobyl, Russia, in 1986 and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 have knocked faith in the industry for the past two decades, the technology is currently undergoing a revival. The British Government is re-establishing a nuclear planning framework and a number of applications for new plants are being lodged in the US. Even Finland is building a reactor.

Helen Clark's Labour-led government has promised much but is delivering little in terms of its world-leading carbon neutrality "aspirations", so a direct attack on the nuclear intentions of others would gain little traction. The Government can, however, continue to raise awkward questions. Though nuclear power generation itself is comparatively "clean", carbon dioxide is emitted at each step of the nuclear fuel chain, from mining and transporting the uranium and building new plants to decommissioning of the old ones. A wide range of safety issues remain, along with the handling and disposal of radioactive waste - and then there is the hypocrisy involved in encouraging nuclear power in some states while taking sanctions against others for seeking it. CO2 production aside, if another Green scenario - peak oil - comes to fruition, the global push for nuclear power generation will only become stronger. Those electric cars the world will be driving will need to be charged somehow.