Paris, January 8:

Surging oil prices, deepening concern about carbon pollution and sudden worries over Russia’s reliability as a gas supplier have been a windfall for Europe’s nuclear and renewable energy industries.

Both sectors are looking to 2006 and beyond to widen their share of Europe’s energy market, where oil and gas remain firmly enthroned. The biggest beneficiary could be the continent’s nuclear firms, whose fortunes have been blighted for nearly two decades.

The 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which sent a pall of radioactive fallout over much of Europe, was a hallmark. It blocked the construction of new nuclear plants across Western Europe, caused others to be mothballed or scrapped, encouraged a shift to wind energy and other clean sources and prompted the rise of Europe’s powerful green movement. Things, though, are changing. Little by little, nuclear’s time in the wilderness is coming to an end.

“Over the past two years, we have seen a perceptible shift in public opinion about nuclear power, people are much more positive,” Laurent Furedi, a spokesman for the industry’s lobby association, Foratom, in Brussels, said.

“There are various factors for it, namely security of supply, the rising price of fossil-fuel energy, and concern about climate change from carbon gases. The public mood is changing a lot, and is overtaking fears about nuclear.” Last year Finland became the first European country in 15 years to start building a new nuclear power plant, a facility scheduled to go into operation in 2009. Bulgaria put out tenders for the construction of a nuclear plant to replace Soviet-era reactors being closed for safety reasons at Kozloduy.

France pushed ahead with plans for a so-called third-generation design, like that being built in Finland, to replace its existing stable of nuclear reactors.

On Wednesday, president Jacques Chirac unveiled a scheme for a ‘fourth-generation’ prototype reactor, designed to be more efficient and produce less waste, that would start up by 2020. In the coming months, Britain is facing a major energy review that British prime minister Tony Blair said will include whether to renew nuclear power stations built in the 1970s and 80s.

The decisions will be “difficult and controversial,” warned Blair, noting indirectly that nuclear plants were negligible emitters of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas.

Across the 25 EU states, 148 nuclear reactors account for 32 per cent of electricity needs, a figure that ranges from just four percent in the Netherlands to 78 per cent in France, according to Foratom.

Some countries have already phased out nuclear or promised to do so, but in several of them there are signs of a change of heart. Sweden has scrapped plans to phase out its 12 nuclear reactors by 2010 in line with a referendum made in 1980, and opinion polls say two-thirds of voters either want the plants to continue until their operational lifespan ends or be replaced by new plants in the future.

Germany’s new coalition government, too, is wrangling over the commitment to phase out nuclear plants by 2020, with two ministers publicly disagreeing last week over what to do. In Italy, whose four power stations were closed down after a post-Chernobyl referendum, prime minister Silvio Berlusconi kindled a nationwide debate last year by calling for nuclear to be included in a major review of energy supplies. A similar debate was unleashed in 2004 in Belgium, where N-plants are scheduled to be phased out by 2015.

Despite this, there remains strong anti-nuclear sentiment in Europe.