FIRST THE credit crunch, now the energy crunch. Just as household electricity bills go stratospheric the first coal-fired power station to be built in Britain for more than 30 years has been approved by Medway Council in Kent. The £1 billion plant at Kingsnorth, near Ashford, will be coal-burning - and carbon-producing - so is hardly an example to India or coal-rich China on how not to overheat the planet. But it will be built if only for one reason - to keep the lights on in the south of England.

Kingsnorth is an example of how the government is caught between preaching green but acting black. The final say on whether the plant will go ahead rests with the government's business secretary, John Hutton. Faced with the prospect of the UK becoming over-reliant on foreign oil and gas and committed to cutting CO2 emissions, the feeling is that Hutton will approve Kingsnorth along with a generation of nuclear plants.

To be fair to the plant's owner E.ON, which also runs Britain's largest offshore windfarm, its proposed plant will be more efficient than the current one, cutting CO2 emissions. It will also be designed to take advantage of carbon capture and sequestration, should such technology be viable in the future, but that's a bit like building a nuclear plant and saying we'll sort out waste storage later. Oops, that's just about what the government is going to do.

This week the government is due to publish the results of its second consultation on nuclear power, followed by an energy white paper. Minded as it is that new reactors should be built as part of the UK's energy mix, it is likely to recommend nuclear as the way ahead.

The first public consultation ended in court, where it was ruled "seriously flawed" by a high court judge after being challenged by Greenpeace. Remember Tony Blair let slip he had seen a "first cut" of the DTI energy review when the department was still a month away from compiling even a summary of the views delivered in more than 50,000 pages of submissions.

The government was ordered to start again, but even before the second consultation is out of the starting blocks it has been condemned as undemocratic and possibly illegal by a group of independent scientists. The consultation group, made up of professors, energy economists and several of the government's own independent adviser on nuclear waste, warns that questions about the risks from radiation, waste disposal and the vulnerability of reactors to terrorist attack have not been dealt with.

The green lobby's learned friends are on standby, but perhaps more important than any legal challenge is the climate of public mistrust of any future energy decisions such criticism implies.

Gordon Brown is as convinced as Blair was of the need for nuclear, so there is no doubt the government is ready to give the go-ahead for a major expansion of nuclear power, with as many as 20 new reactors being built by private firms. Given the capacity for entanglement that planning laws give a Scottish government, the nuclear debate is also a handy cri-de-coeur for Scottish independence. It is unlikely any nuclear reactors will be built in Scotland in the years to come. Jack McConnell said as much when he was Labour leader, and the current SNP administration is avowedly anti-nuclear.

It does raise the question of where Scotland's power is going to come from in the next 20 years. Two nuclear plants, Hunterston B in Ayrshire and Torness in East Lothian, generate about 40% of Scotland's energy but are reaching the end of their lives. Hunterston is due to close in three years and Torness in 2023.

Having Scandinavian building standards for new homes is one thing, but the 'leccy for the energy-inefficient houses most of us live in has to come from somewhere. The alternative might be a wind farm on every hill, but that doesn't win many votes. This gives environmentalists a huge dilemma - do they hate nuclear power more than they hate wind farms?

Sometimes it pays to start reading a book from the back (especially if you're a journalist going to interview the author and haven't done your homework). I was due to meet James Lovelock, grandfather of the environmentalism, when, reverse-reading the last pages of his Revenge Of Gaia, I found a hostile passage on wind farms. It seemed his argument for nuclear power had less to do with saving the planet than it had to do with preserving the view from his Devon home.

Lovelock, a highly regarded scientist, made his reputation in the 1970s on the Gaia theory, that the Earth behaves as if it were a superorganism, made up from all living things and their material environment. In Revenge Of Gaia he argued that the only hope for reducing carbon emissions and replacing oil lay in a new generation of nuclear power stations.

For a time his influence almost swung the public debate. According to opinion polls, just over 50% of people accepted nuclear as part of a package of measures required to fill the energy gap. If you read the figures closely, though, just over 34% positively endorse nuclear power, and the rest is made up of those who understand we've backed ourselves into an energy and environmental cul de sac.

The most stinging criticism from the nuclear consultation group is that consultation should have been "conducted over a long timeframe". Maybe starting 20 years ago? Now the public is cornered into making a decision from which there is no escape without a hangover the size of a nuclear power station.