This French gamble has paid off handsomely. Nuclear electricity is now the country's third biggest export, producing £35bn a year. The Germans have promised to close down their reactors by 2020, but nobody believes that any more. Italy, which now imports 80 per cent of its electricity, just announced plans to build its own reactors. This prompted Greenpeace to call the decision "a declaration of war".

Still unaware of the French success, Britain is fretting that a nuclear revival will create an "unmanageable problem of nuclear waste". Secretary of State John Hutton has proposed paying communities to accept repositories.

James Lovelock, Britain's outstanding environmentalist and the originator of the "Gaia hypothesis", has a better idea. He has volunteered to bury his quantity of nuclear waste in his own back yard. "It would occupy about one cubic metre and would provide energy to heat my home," he says. The main byproduct of nuclear waste, after all, is heat.

In fact, Hutton's suggestion may open up even more interesting possibilities. Why not turn a nuclear-waste repository into a tourist attraction? Britain's Nuclear Waste Tourism Centre could attract visitors from all over the world, who would marvel at how we have spent so many years foolishly ignoring this powerful and benign source of energy.