AS a political bomb thrower, One Nation MLC Mark Latham is probably enjoying the ruckus being generated by his private member's bill aimed at overturning a state ban on nuclear energy.
Similarly, Deputy Premier John Barilaro regularly threatens to oppose his Coalition counterparts, but the Liberal Party is no more likely than the ALP to consider upsetting the nuclear status quo - even if climate change is still, as Kevin Rudd put it, the "greatest moral challenge of our generation".
Nuclear power has long been a great unmentionable in Australian politics.
At this stage in the world's political and environmental history, this looms as something of an irony, because a close look at the claims of more than a few nations proclaiming an end to their reliance on coal shows they are able to do so only because they have a nuclear backup in their pocket.
Just last week, the UK was making a song and dance about its last megawatt of coal-fired power being just around the corner. And that's true enough.
But the latest figures from the UK's Office of Gas and Electricity Markets show that fossil fuels - gas and bio-energy - remain the biggest source of electricity generation.
They provide a steady 35 per cent, wind-dominated renewables have hit about 25 per cent and rising, with nuclear a steady 20 per cent, in third place. Many other countries - led by France, at about 70 per cent - have electricity markets either dominated or buttressed by nuclear generators.
Australia might be a natural nation for solar, but nothing can make the sun shine at night, and if the world's biggest battery in South Australia can carry enough charge to run Tomago aluminium smelter for just eight minutes, then even the biggest renewables boosters should recognise we are a long, long way away from doing without baseload generation.
That means, as Anthony Albanese and Scott Morrison both acknowledge, that coal will be with us yet for at least a few decades to come.
In Australia at least, nuclear power is the ultimate NIMBY issue.
It's one thing for Upper Hunter MP Michael Johnsen to support the idea from a distance: it would be another thing, entirely, from up close.
Yet without an as-yet-unanticipated breakthrough in power storage technology, nuclear power might firm as a feasible alternative if the electorate really wants to rid itself of coal.
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