But both of these are temporary surprise reprieves, as everyone knows.

Meanwhile, in terms of energy self-reliance for Czechs and for Europe, the clock is running down. Everyone from the European Commission to the Czech Green Party agrees we must wean ourselves from a reliance on Russian fossil fuels that can be throttled any time the bear gets into a pricing dispute.

Some, like President Václav Klaus, say this means we've got to ramp up on admittedly efficient nuclear energy. More moderate voices, such as columnist Peter Sain ley Berry of the European Union's EU Observer, posits that plutonium has increasing appeal these days, arguing thus:

"If we are prepared to stomach nuclear bombs against an imagined threat, we can surely learn to stomach nuclear power stations against a real one. With China opening a new coal-fired power station every week, it is an argument worth making."

But nuke skeptics like Daniel Vondrouš, first secretary of the Environmental Ministry, counters with a point often overlooked: It's important to remember that nuclear energy requires nonrenewable resources. All of the fuel for the Czech Republic's nuclear power stations is, moreover, imported. Ironically enough, the fuel for Temelín is soon to be imported from Austria, one of the plant's biggest critics.

Vondrouš also notes that the storage of nuclear waste has yet to be properly resolved, as we've seen from the anxiety caused by temporary surface storage in Dukovany, South Moravia ("Waste not," News, Nov. 22-28). Not that sequestered underground storage has won over many fans either, what with the statistical challenge of promising dozens of future generations that such waste will remain safe and contaminate no resources.

Add to this the expense of storage, operations, monitoring and legal battles to keep Czech nuclear plants humming and it becomes clear that this response is hardly an unqualified solution.

Perhaps it's just as well, as Vondrouš says, that the Czech Republic will soon rely less on its nuclear energy once the aging Dukovany power plant is shut down.

The less sexy but more viable long-term answer is a coordinated strategy that ranges from tough rules for energy efficiency to helping to foster biomass use, as in the pioneering town of Kněžice. While no one expects the latter to pay for itself any time soon and the 127 million Kč ($5.95 million) Kněžice experiment was made possible only through EU funding, it shows what's possible through better use of existing technologies.

As simple a thing as better insulation can stretch energy resources further than most people imagine. According to EU public affairs consultant Zdeněk Andrlík, this problem alone causes enormous waste in the Czech Republic because of its hundreds of thousands of poorly constructed, drafty communist-era panel apartments.