KEY POINTS:
The prospect of Prime Minister Helen Clark riding an anti-nuclear charger into this year's meeting of Apec leaders may endear her to a domestic constituency that lacks all sense of reason when it comes to matters nuclear.
It may even, heaven forbid, provide useful television footage for Labour
to use as advertising in next year's general election campaign as it promotes Clark as a climate-change warrior.
But Clark will be displaying a tin ear to the momentous problems faced by polluters such as China and the political sensibilities of the United States and Australia if she opposes the inclusion of nuclear energy among possible alternatives to power sources that arguably have a bigger impact on climate change.
Although New Zealand media have played up a showdown in Sydney this weekend, Clark will be on shaky ground if she tells Apec leaders that New Zealand is against nuclear power for peaceful purposes.
Clark is an architect of New Zealand's anti-nuclear legislation that had its genesis in Cold War tensions. New Zealanders were horrified by French nuclear testing in the Pacific and worried that any presence of US nuclear-armed ships in our harbours might make us a target for the Evil Empire.
There are legitimate concerns over the disposal of nuclear waste. The New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act aimed to establish us as a nuclear-free zone and a country that would promote disarmament and international arms control. But there is no clause stating that New Zealand should expand the legislation to promote an international stance against using nuclear power for electricity.
The draft Apec leaders' communique refers to the use of nuclear energy by interested economies, alongside other efficiency mechanisms to combat climate change, including clean-coal technologies and renewables.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has warned that the US and Australia may try to toughen up the final document at the leaders' pow-wow in Sydney this weekend.
This presents a challenge for Clark, who moved to get climate change on the agenda two years ago. But she has since seen the US and Australia - regarded as pariahs by climate-change activists because they have not committed to the demonstrably faulty Kyoto Protocol - move to centre stage of the debate.
Clark says nuclear energy is not something New Zealand will ever tout. But there is a big difference between such touting and conceding that its use by countries such as China, which plans a string of nuclear power stations, can stop their people from choking on pollution from the coal-fired plants that power the world's factories and also cook the planet.
It's easy for little New Zealand to be precious. But few other countries in the Asia-Pacific area are blessed with our natural advantages, including few people and plenty of hydro and geothermal resources. Australia, facing water shortages and a pretty dismal future on the UN climate-change scenarios, has acknowledged there may come a time when it will install nuclear power stations.
Harder to swallow is Clark's reported concession that the clause on nuclear power in the draft communique meets definitions compatible with Kyoto - but that is not something we are going to endorse. She should ponder whether taking such a position might seem illogical. Surely if the definition is compatible with Kyoto, Clark should give it a tick? The inconvenient truth is that while New Zealand has ratified Kyoto it has not honoured it.
New Zealand has made no progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and also faces a multimillion-dollar bill for being a hefty polluter rather than a net contributor to greenhouse-gas reductions.
Other political leaders will be too polite to make this point. But they will not thank Clark if she is on a shaky Kiwi horse.
Memories of the Anzus dispute still rankle, even though all three nations have come a long way to re-establish the warm relationship that existed before the fracture leading to the suspension of the Anzus alliance.
A high-powered US delegation in Auckland tomorrow for the US-New Zealand Partnership Forum contains members with personal experience of the 1980s dispute.
Clark will not do New Zealand any favours if she ignites new nuclear divides. Far better to forge a spirit of partnership with the US so the two countries can combine on some of the major technological challenges posed by climate change.
