The G8 summit of leading industrial nations issued a favorable communiqu� and U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair both spoke warmly of nuclear power's role in the energy mix. China and India have each made it clear that they see large numbers of new nuclear power stations as their path to energy-hungry development.

But any euphoria in the world's nuclear power industry was cooled last week by two unrelated developments. The first was an opinion poll in the world's most nuclear-dependent country that showed French voters to be highly skeptical of any claims of clean and safe nuclear power, even though France's 59 nuclear power stations provide roughly 90 percent of the country's electricity.

A survey released by the BVA opinion research center suggests that French voters do not share the pro-nuclear views of successive French governments and energy officials, who are investing heavily in research into a new "fourth generation" design of safer, more efficient reactors that produce much less nuclear waste.

But the French heat wave of 2003, which saw reactors closed when there was too little water in the rivers to cool them and which featured TV images of reactors being hosed down as an emergency measure, seems to have changed the hitherto pro-nuclear attitudes of the French public.

Fewer than one in three of the 1,000 people polled said that nuclear energy was the best way to meet electricity demand in the future. A large majority of those questioned -- 84 percent -- wanted alternative energy sources, and 80 percent called for a referendum on whether France should scrap nuclear energy altogether.

Those figures might have been even worse had the poll been taken after Sweden's nuclear accident at the Forsmark power station on July 25, where employees at the plant launched a local sensation when they told Swedish media that the reactor had come "close to meltdown," and that for over 21 minutes, they had no way of telling what was happening inside the reactor.

Lars-Olov Hoegland, head of the construction department at Swedish utility company Vattenfall and a former director of the Forsmark reactor, claims it was the "worst incident since Chernobyl and Harrisburg," a reference to the 1979 meltdown at Three-Mile Island in the United States. Hoegland also accused the plant's operators of trying to play down the seriousness of the event.

After the Forsmark reactor was shut down, Sweden's nuclear energy authority, SKI, ordered the shutdown of five more reactors across the country as a precaution and launched an urgent inquiry into what went wrong. Sweden, which gets around half of its electricity from nuclear power, is now tackling the subsequent energy crisis triggered by the closure of half of the country's reactors.

SKI's initial findings, which called the accident "serious," claim that the alarmism over Forsmark has been overstated. They claim that a short circuit cut the power supply to the reactor's cooling system, but that two diesel-powered generators were then automatically triggered, allowing some of the emergency cooling system to function.

Since then, SKI echoed Swedish media reports that other reactors could suffer the same problem, and ordered the closure of five more reactors, including the multi-reactor facility outside the city of Oskarshamm, where local officials said they could not guarantee that their plants might be vulnerable to the same problem.

The incident has transformed the debate in Sweden, where the government agreed in 1999 after a referendum to phase out Sweden's nuclear power stations altogether, and has already shuttered two of the country's initial stock of 12 power plants. But global warming and rising energy prices began to change public opinion, which has in the past two years been rethinking the 1999 decision.

The Forsmark incident has changed all that -- and not just in Sweden. Media coverage in Germany and Britain and across Europe has been extensive, re-opening the entire question of nuclear safety just as pro-nuclear politicians like Blair thought that the argument had been virtually won. The coverage in Finland, the first European country to be building a new nuclear power station, has been intense.

Blair announced a big energy review last November, just a few months after winning re-election, in which any questions about nuclear power were fended off by reference to the government's earlier energy review in 2003 which ruled out nuclear power as too costly and said Britain should focus instead on renewable energy supplies like wind and wave power.

At Britain's annual Labor Party conference last year, one former minister, Denis MacShane, made a passionate speech on "the moral case for nuclear power," suggesting that coal mining had killed many thousand times more people than nuclear power, and that it was the only reasonable way for poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to generate the power needed for development.

The swiftness of the policy change outraged British Greens, who claimed the electorate had been cheated. But recent polls by the YouGov group have suggested that there is now a small majority in favor of nuclear power, although with a dramatic gender gap, Over 60 percent of men, but less than 24 percent of women, agreed that it was "vital" to build new nuclear power stations.

Despite all the potent arguments about global warming and the inherent safety of new reactor designs, nuclear power remains desperately vulnerable to the massive publicity -- and hostility -- generated by media reports of nuclear incidents and accidents. Add in the unresolved question about the safe disposal of nuclear waste, and nuclear power's second coming may be delayed yet again.

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