Though the center-left administration has ensured a decision is years away, the move has rekindled a debate over the wisdom of "going nuclear" in a country renowned for both its natural beauty and its earthquakes.

"Chile is totally lacking in (nuclear) expertize," said Rodrigo Herrera, head of environmental group Greenpeace Chile. "And it's just not true that with nuclear power we will solve the energy issue in Chile."

On one thing, everyone is agreed: Chile needs to do something to meet its pressing energy needs.

Producing no natural gas and almost no oil of its own, Chile relies on gas imports from Argentina, which is facing increasing pressure to supply its domestic market and has hiked the price of exports to its Andean neighbor.

Gas-rich Bolivia, to the north, refuses to sell gas to Chile because of a long-running dispute over landlocked Bolivia's demand that it be given access to the sea.

To compound the problem, Chile's economy is particularly vulnerable to energy shortages because a large part of it is based on copper mining, which is extremely energy-intensive.

FIRST CONSIDERED UNDER PINOCHET

Chile first considered the nuclear option in the late 1970s but the military junta of dictator Augusto Pinochet decided it was not economically viable.

Back then, natural gas accounted for only 10 percent of Chile's energy consumption. Now the figure is around 25 percent and rising, making the country more vulnerable to the vagaries of Argentine export prices.

"Nuclear energy is now clearly an option," said Sebastian Bernstein, a private energy consultant based in Santiago. "The cost of these projects would be competitive."

Environmentalists say Chile's vulnerability to earthquakes makes it a dangerous place to build a power station, but Bernstein said this was no longer a concern.

"This is an issue that technically has been resolved," he sad at a conference on nuclear power in Santiago this week.

"Nuclear power stations have been built in countries with earthquake risks as great or even greater than Chile's, like Japan for example."

Julio Vergara, a nuclear engineer at Santiago's Catholic University, said Chile's environmental lobby should embrace nuclear technology as a relatively clean alternative to fossil fuels.

"In my view, the main justification for nuclear energy is environmental," he said.

He also said there might well be untapped uranium deposits in mineral-rich northern Chile that could be used to generate electricity.

While the debate is likely to continue, there is no chance of Chile going nuclear any time soon.