THE Government's energy review is certainly worth more of a greeting than Greenpeace's confetti of yellow stickers.

Like the pensions review - if we want to retire before 67 we will have to save more either through taxes or private schemes - the use of nuclear energy is far from a clear cut, black or white decision.

A gimmick may grab headlines, but it doesn't further the debate at all.

Our existing nuclear power stations supply up to 25 per cent of our electricity. They will be obsolete within 20 years. We have to replace them somehow.

North Sea gas is running out. We will soon be dependent on very expensive gas from Russia and Nigeria. Oil, too, is costly and comes from an unstable part of the world.

Talk of expense, though, misses the point. Burning fossil fuels is blighting our planet. Our reliance upon them has to be significantly reduced.

So what are the alternatives? Windpower? But the wind doesn't blow all the time - in cold, frosty weather, it doesn't blow at all - and even the existing turbines are controversial in their unsightliness.

Solar power is unaffordable for most and, again, reliant upon the unreliable: the sun shining.

No one has successfully harnessed wavepower, and Teesside's biofuels plant is in difficulty before it has begun generating.

Nuclear power, though, has generated safely in Britain for the last 50 years without accident or terrorist attack or pumping out carbon.

Yet you don't have to be a member of Greenpeace to realise nuclear's drawbacks. A vast amount of carbon is produced mining and transporting uranium to our powerplants.

The nuclear industry would continue to require Government subsidy, and no one would really want to bring up their children in a nuclear shadow.

A nuclear powerplant would be a terrorist target, and even a human accident - however genuinely caused -would have catastrophic, Chernobyl-like effects.

The main problem, though, is that nuclear power creates deadly waste that stays radioactive for 240,000 years and we don't have a clue how to dispose of it permanently.

So we park it up in the hope that our grandchildren are clever enough to clean up after us.

This is the debate. Let's have it. Without childish gimmicks. If our future isn't nuclear, what is it?