By Lenore Taylor
So much for Julia Gillard's demand to her troops that they work methodically through all the unfinished reforms Labor already has on the table. It took less than a week for some bright sparks to call for a fresh debate about nuclear power.
Someone needs to tell them their best chance of getting nuclear power up is to concentrate on the old, unresolved debate about putting a price on carbon.
Without a carbon price nuclear power will never be viable, unless governments step in to build and run the nuclear power stations themselves, which would put a pretty big dent in projected budget surpluses.
But with a carbon price, the private players in the energy market will quickly sort out which technologies are the most economic and whether nuclear is viable - as its supporters contend - or too dangerous and expensive, as the Greens insist. If it's the former, supporters of nuclear energy will have a very powerful argument.
The report that triggered the latest flurry about the ''nuclear option'' found that even with the modest carbon price projected under the Rudd government's failed emissions trading scheme, combined cycle gas, wind and ''favourably located'' geothermal (which much of it isn't) would be viable by 2020, with nuclear possibly becoming competitive by 2030 when the carbon price got to about $80 a tonne.
Labor and the Greens have spent weeks skirmishing about the ambition of any carbon price that might be agreed at the multi-party committee by the end of next year. So far the committee hasn't been able to agree on its guiding principles.
As for Tony Abbott, he reckons he can bring Australia's emissions down ''without dramatically changing our existing sources of energy''. How he would achieve such a feat is unclear, since electricity generation accounts for almost 40 per cent of our greenhouse gas output.
Labor needs to put all its effort into getting a carbon price through this Parliament, because without one its green credentials will look even more battered than they did last time, and the climate policy debate will keep going around in circles for another 10 years.
Labor's national conference could debate nuclear power for all that time, but in the real world where a change in the way we generate electricity is urgent, nothing will have happened.