Nuclear vision - from inevitable to invisible

These include the fact that nuclear power is still illegal under federal environment legislation, it is prohibited by state parliaments up and down the east coast and nuclear waste transport, storage and disposal is against the law and strongly opposed by communities across Australia.

A re-elected Coalition government would have to be willing to try and override an array of state legislation and take control of the electricity grid and pricing across Australia to impose their nuclear reactor plan.

In addition, their proposed nuclear industry would need massive and perverse public subsidies to ever get off the ground.

At the opening of the meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Spain last week, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change said failure to tackle climate change "would be nothing less than criminally irresponsible".

Instead of wasting our time with this nuclear distraction that is too costly, too slow and not popular, the people of Australia want and support investment in clean, renewable energy technologies, not nuclear power.

And, worryingly for Mr Howard, it seems many of his colleagues on the conservative side of politics are increasingly taking the same view.

Less than a week out from the federal election, former NSW Liberal leader and current NSW opposition energy spokesperson Peter Debnam told the NSW Energy Summit that "after looking at community concerns, construction costs and long-term decommissioning and storage costs, it is clear for Australia that renewables beat nuclear".

Having claimed the federal election was to be a mandate for nuclear power, in the space of just 12 months, the concept of Australia's nuclear future has gone from being John Howard's golden chalice to becoming his Achilles heel.