That’s the spirit: let’s boil a kettle while we still can.

Pardon?

Don’t tell me you missed the CBI’s warnings that natural gas supplies could fail this winter so the UK needs to find new, reliable energy sources.

But how does that effect my brew exactly?

Not directly — just yet anyway — but Tony Blair wants to have a “serious look” at building new nuclear power stations as part of the Government’s review of energy policy.

Isn’t it sensible to look at all the options?

Environmentalists are concerned that the Government has already decided that nuclear power is the answer to meeting the UK’s commitment on cutting carbon emissions under the Kyoto Protocol while ensuring that our lights never go out.

But nuclear power is as old-fashioned as windmills.

Only here in the UK, elsewhere nuclear power is a hot topic. France won its bid to host the £6.6 billion research project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor this year, while in Finland work has started to build the first new nuclear plant in Western Europe since the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Finland’s Parliament agreed by 107 votes to 92, back in 2002, to build the country’s fifth nuclear power station: saunas (and the Finnish paper industry) require a lot of power.

Didn’t Chernobyl prove that nuclear power isn’t safe?

Not at all, according to the pro-nuclear lobby which is gaining momentum. The European Pressurised Water Reactor model adopted in Finland is designed to be fail-safe, unlike Chernobyl.

Well, if it’s good enough for the Finns . . .

It’s also good enough for Professor Sir David King, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, who once opposed nuclear power, and Sir James Lovelock, the well-respected environmental scientist who has come round to the idea of using nuclear power to contain global warming.

Is there anyone left to lobby for windmills, aka renewable energy sources?

Michael Meacher, the Government’s former Environment Minister, puts the case against nuclear power bluntly: “We need nuclear like a hole in the head.” Jonathon Porritt, the chairman of the Government’s UK Sustainable Development Commission, is also unconvinced by the argument on nuclear power. “It is not the answer to tackling climate change,” he says. “It is expensive and leaves a legacy that remains dangerous for tens of thousands of years.”

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