The Howard government's nuclear review, headed by the former Telstra boss Ziggy Switkowski, reported that one-third of Australia's energy needs could be supplied by 25 nuclear power stations, commissioned and built by the year 2050.
Labor did not hesitate; it commenced the most opportunistic public campaign of opposition imaginable, ignoring the report's conditionalities and its long lead-time and spruiking "Mr Howard's 25 nuclear reactors, coming to an electorate near you".
Local electorate material advised marginal seat voters that seeing as John Howard hadn't specified exactly where the associated "nuclear waste dumps" were going to go, they might as well go on and assume that a home Chernobyl was heading for the nature strip.
Pretty potent stuff; when it comes to political fruit in this country, it doesn't hang much lower than "Nuclear Reactor Coming Your Way".
As a result, Kevin Rudd is just as hidebound by his own past words and pronouncements as Peter Garrett is.
The only difference is that the PM is showing no signs of recanting, even in the face of the growing energy crisis.
Here's what the environmental activist Tim Flannery wrote in 1996: "Before we make up our minds on how we respond to the Prime Minister's call for debate on nuclear power, let's think through where our response might lead. An angry rebuttal of nuclear power could mire our nation in a heated but not very enlightened argument that will take the focus off the real issue - climate change - for years."
Sounds kind of prescient, doesn't it?
Malcolm Turnbull believes that nuclear power is a real option for Australia, but he doesn't see any use at all in pursuing it without some kind of bipartisan open-mindedness, and he is right.
And Labor's refusal to contemplate the issue is looking more and more like stubbornness. We are quite happy to flog our uranium to others for peaceful purposes, after all.
Many of the reservations about nuclear power - including the cost - need to be reconsidered in light of what we have learned about the real cost of fossil fuels.
And the Prime Minister is only too prepared to remind us that the consequences of failing to cut our carbon emissions are gothic in the extreme; death by sunstroke or beriberi, catastrophic weather events and the disappearance of the Great Barrier Reef.
If climate change is indeed the greatest challenge of our time, is it really appropriate to be ignoring one feasible and low-carbon - albeit contentious - solution? Is the Government serious enough about all of this to risk its own political hide?
Not at the moment, it seems, although there are ministers who will readily concede in private that nuclear should be part of the debate.
Why should Australia martyr itself for world energy purposes by consenting to store nuclear waste in the vast and peaceful expanses of our largely deserted continent, the nuclear opponents ask.
Well, the sacrifice of Australian business interests towards an ambitious world effort to cut carbon emissions has the distinct whiff of martyrdom about it, and that doesn't seem to bother the Ruddbot and his followers.
What would it mean for the Rudd Government now to allow a sensible revisitation of the nuclear issue?
A strong degree of political discomfort, certainly; accusations of backflipping, of course, and considerable loss of skin from the prime ministerial hide.
