Yahoo News 27 Jun 08;
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Friday that the country did not need to adopt nuclear energy to address climate change.
The centre-left leader's stance reverses the policy of his conservative predecessor John Howard, who announced plans to embrace the next generation of power plans before he was voted out of office last November.
Rudd said his government would pursue other options to combat climate change.
"On the question of nuclear, we believe that we have a huge range of energy options available to Australia beyond nuclear with which and through which we can respond to the climate change challenge," he told ABC Radio.
Australia currently has only one nuclear reactor, which is used to produce isotopes for medical research.
But it has plentiful uranium deposits and exports about 600 million dollars (570 million US) of the radioactive element a year.
Rudd was responding to comments from a high-profile member of his Labor Party, former New South Wales state premier Bob Carr, urging Australia to use nuclear power until technological advances allow the bulk of the country's energy to come from renewable resources.
"There is no other bridging technology to get us from this catastrophic booming of coal and oil into the era of cheap and infinite renewable power," Carr told The Australian newspaper.
"We all want to get there, but it's decades off and we need a bridge."
