THE first thing to be said about Mr Justice Sullivan's ruling on a new generation of nuclear power stations in Britain is that the Blair government richly deserves this consultational comeuppance. It is, as one political opponent aptly observed yesterday, a judgment on the Prime Minister's sofa-style approach to decision-making. As former cabinet colleague Charles Clarke warned last year: "Major policy issues . . . cannot simply be dealt with as an aside at the CBI's annual dinner or a half sentence at the Guildhall."

Tony Blair has had nearly 10 years to face up to the growing threat from climate change and the inevitable consequences for how we power and light our homes, work and public spaces in future. Our existing stock of nuclear stations, still generating a fifth of all the UK's electricity needs, is well into middle age, heading for retirement.

How to replace that capacity - and ageing fossil-fuelled plants as well - is an issue that's been crying out for clear leadership and informed advocacy for years. But New Labour has fudged that challenge, cowering behind successive, voluminous energy reviews, while the prime minister smuggled his own conversion to a new nuclear build programme into an aside in a speech to industrialists.

Blair's 2003 energy white paper had parked the nuclear question as an "unattractive option". Its 2006 successor review contemplated, at most, four stations' worth (six gigawatts) of replacement capacity, none of it coming on stream until 2021, dangerously close to the horizon where all the existing stations, bar Sizewell, would have closed and be facing decommissioning. Yet, almost as a throwaway line - or was it quiver of resolve? - the prime minister told business leaders the nuclear option was back on the agenda "with a vengeance". Tony Blair could take us into a deeply unpopular war in Iraq.

But he couldn't summon up such decisive leadership on how best to keep the lights on, at home, 20 years from now.

His anointed successor sometimes trades in the same brand of subterfuge. Gordon Brown, it was, who signalled Labour's intention to replace Trident in that half sentence at a Lord Mayor's Banquet in the Guildhall. And now Mr Justice Sullivan has caught them out, finding in favour of Greenpeace in language which echoes his judgment, nearly a year ago, that the system of control orders used against terrorism suspects was "an affront to justice".

Something had "gone clearly and radically wrong" with the consultation exercise, the judge ruled. The review was, in essence, an issues paper. It contained no actual proposals and the information on offer was "wholly insufficient for them to make an intelligent response". With a new white paper imminent, ministers are resigned to starting the consultation process all over again. But, in spite of their cries about resolving this issue now being "a race against time", this administration has only itself to blame. It should have had the guts to place its energy cards clearly face up on the table years ago. It didn't.

That said, despite the jubilation across the green lobby, this judgment is not a ruling on the wisdom or otherwise of building a new generation of nuclear power plants. Symbolically, three days before Mr Justice Sullivan ruled the government had behaved in a way that was "seriously flawed" and "procedurally unfair", the main Royal Courts of Justice building in London was plunged into darkness, thanks to a massive power failure in the Aldwych area.

The issue of security of supply will not go away. And away from the trench warfare of the pro and anti-nuclear lobbies - where no amount of consultation will change fixed mindsets materially - there is a vast body of floating opinion that is almost certainly open to reasoned leadership on the best way forward. Instead, it has been treated to sustained fudge and spin from those whose minds are closed on both sides of this debate.

The government's consultation may have been a sham, as Greenpeace alleges. But the willingness of Greenpeace to contemplate a mixed economy in energy supply, one that includes a continuing element of nuclear generation, is non-existent. It resorts to the same tricks politicians deploy over how to fill the 20% of the UK's electricity needs currently supplied from nuclear stations.

It's not really 20%, they tell you. Reactor problems regularly reduce this. And, even if it is a fifth, its impact on reducing CO2 emissions is very small. It only provides 3.6% of the UK's total energy, after all. I am quoting directly from Greenpeace's press release yesterday. But if that 20% is not replaced and is filled by burning more fossil fuels instead, we will simply add to our carbon emissions, not reduce them.

"While they talk about transitioning to a low-carbon system," wrote Patrick Moore, a lifelong environmentalist and co-founder of Greenpeace, in yesterday's Independent, "they dismiss nuclear, the only energy source capable of actually delivering us from an increasing use of fossil fuels and their resulting carbon emissions.

"It is simply not credible to claim that wind and solar energy can replace coal and natural gas. Wind and solar are, by nature, intermittent, and therefore not capable of delivering the baseload power required for an energy grid . . . Simply put, the only choice is between fossil fuel and nuclear."

Oh no it's not, the green lobby will counter. Go for a decentralised energy system instead, they will urge, one based on maximum use of combined heat and power and renewable energy, when anyone who has ever looked seriously at the numbers knows that approach can never fill the approaching nuclear void. They know it can't.

For their ultimate aim is to shock us all out of our energy-profligate ways. And demonising nuclear power to such an extent in the public mind that no new station will ever be constructed again is part of a dream of turning the clock back to pre-industrial times. If the price is burning even more fossil fuel in the short-term, so be it.

Those of us who are in favour of maximising our renewable resources and our collective commitment to energy-efficient living, but who also believe it would be madness to abandon proven ways of generating large quantities of carbon-free electricity from nuclear fission, need to make our voices heard in this increasingly sterile stand-off. The Blair government has flunked it. Greenpeace and its allies are impervious to any nuclear compromise. We need to rescue the concept of sustainability from those whose minds are closed on this issue.