Sarkozy is back in the news. And the debate is relevant here too.

Sarkozy recently announced the building of a second nuclear power station based on an EPW (European Pressurised Water) reactor.

Unfortunately, this was shortly followed by news of the leak of a small quantity of liquid containing traces of uranium at another power station in the south of France.

What is of interest is that neither the proposed reactor nor the accident was front page news. In the case of the leak, the regulatory and local authorities took rapid action to reassure the public, placing the incident at "one" on a scale of risk that ran to seven.

Both stories were tucked away in middle pages. Apart from a few of the usual suspects doing a ritual dance of protest, it was all dismissed with a collective gallic shrug.

The fact is that the French are comfortable with nuclear energy and have been for a long time.

The industry has an enviable record for safety and security, it provides the vast bulk of French electric power in a reliable and steady supply and relatively cheaply.

In the current context, it totally lacks a carbon footprint, and the price is not determined by OPEC or the oil speculators.

Landing in France recently, we passed a huge nuclear installation near Cherbourg, and drove past at least two others that we knew of en route to the south-west, where, a few kilometres down the road there is another on the banks of the Gironde at the historic city of Blaye.

There is, however, a marked scarcity of two-headed calves, deformed sheep, luminous fish or any other of the horrors imagined by anti-nuclear campaigners. The children all look healthy and normal, and life expectancy for adults (fortified by a diet of wine, cheese and oysters) is marginally better than the rest of France.

Which brings me back to Ireland.

For how much longer can we refuse to discuss even the possibility of using nuclear energy as a source of electricity?

At a time when fossil fuels are running out, with China and India ever demanding more, and prices of oil and gas going through the roof, we cannot remain dependant on this one source.

It will take a huge number of windmills, marine turbines and solar panels to make up the deficit (and these too have their critics on grounds of environmental degradation).

Off-shore oil and gas reserves, even if the green lobby allows them to be brought ashore, only become economical because of the exorbitant price of everything else.

Apart from which, to be at the end of a thousand-mile long pipeline is hardly a recipe for energy security, with 10 or more political or entrepreneurial hands on successive stopcocks, leaving Ireland in a position of total dependency on the whims of the international market and speculators for supplies of oil and natural gas.

It is ironic, however, that despite our protestations of anti-nuclear purity, some proportion of the power which we import through electrical interconnectors from Britain and Europe is inevitably the product of nuclear reactors in one country or another.

This is another Irish solution to an Irish problem: quite happy to enjoy the fruits of sin while the sin itself, and the guilt of sinning are conveniently exported.

IRISH political debate on nuclear energy has been paralysed for decades by the spectre of the scandal of a criminally badly managed installation at Sellafield (previously known as Windscale) in Cumbria where leakage after leakage was left unreported through union power and the need to preserve employment in a distressed Labour constituency.

The disaster of the cataclysmic collapse of a clapped-out, Soviet-era reactor at Chernobyl has added its own ghastly resonance.

A study carried out for the Northern Ireland Department of Health in the 1980s could find no linkage between Sellafield and a high incidence of some cancers on the County Down coast.

In fact, there was more measurable radiation from the average granite gatepost in the Mourne Mountains. The highest incidence of Down Syndrome in the North was in the west, the farthest area away from Cumbria.

Nuclear energy is now cleaner; reactors are safer and better policed.

There is no reason for us to bury our heads in the sand, and, while maintaining even current demands for energy and electric power, perversely refuse to contemplate the use of one source that may in the end prove to be less environmentally damaging than most of the alternatives.

Nuclear power will never be the sole, or even the main source of energy in Ireland.

In the end it may not prove to be the best, but there are balances to be held between possible risk and potential gain as other sources dry up and options narrow.

It will, in any case, be some years down the road, but all the more reason to begin an honest and open debate.

This is a task for political leaders and they should begin now.

To assert categorically in advance that nuclear-generated power can play no part in a national energy strategy is to sacrifice the future to the emotions of the past.

They do, indeed, order these things better in France...