Washington ? If presidential willpower can end eras, the generation-old fear of nuclear energy born in the catastrophes of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl is marked for extinction. The world will move instead into a confident time of nuclear power plants helping to reduce global warming, prevent energy shortages and curb atomic arsenals from being developed by rogue countries.

That is a tall order even for the nuclear genie. But the importance that George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin attach to atomic energy as the fuel of the future is already a strategic fact of life. It guides U.S. foreign policy, Russian economic ambitions and cooperation between the White House and the Kremlin on a global agenda.

Bush’s embrace of nuclear energy as a one-stop panacea for the world’s ills has come fast and strong. It is another example of his willingness to break away from the conventional wisdom of his father’s world and wade deeply into uncharted waters. It is also a measure of his desperation over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and his deep disquiet over depending on unstable, tyrannical regimes in the Middle East for oil and gas.

“For the sake of economic security and national security, the United States of America must aggressively move forward with the construction of nuclear power plants,” Bush announced in a May 24 speech. As he spoke at an electricity generating plant in Pennsylvania – the state in which the Three Mile Island incident occurred in 1979 – Bush was already in discussions with Putin about a joint statement on nuclear cooperation for the Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg.

In offering to clear the way for Russia to import and store nuclear waste from U.S.-supplied reactors abroad, Bush is for the second time making nuclear energy the centerpiece of a major foreign policy initiative. Last July, he agreed to seek congressional approval for restoring civilian nuclear cooperation with India.

An unspoken aim of the U.S-Russia proposal is to provide significant economic incentives to the Kremlin to cooperate in containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The financial damage that confrontation with Iran would do to Russia’s nuclear energy industry weighs heavily in Putin’s thinking, according to U.S. and Russian officials. Bush and the Russian president also envision broader efforts to provide supplies of nuclear energy to developing countries, coupled with international inspections that would head off atomic weapons proliferation, these officials say.

The Russian leader intends to expand his country’s reliance on nuclear power plants to conserve Russian oil and gas for lucrative export markets far into the future, according to diplomatic reports. This would reduce the financial burden of the domestic subsidies that the Russian government provides for oil and gas products.

This vision, an important part of the “energy security” concept Putin has pushed for the G-8 gathering, has been welcomed at a White House stung by the violence and instability of the Middle East.

But the planned Russian nuclear expansion has not been widely publicized by the Kremlin in this 20th anniversary year of the Chernobyl meltdown. That disaster immediately caused more than 30 deaths, the evacuation of 1,500 workers and a global panic about the safety of nuclear reactors.

As Bush noted in his May 24 speech, no new atomic energy plants (or oil refineries, for that matter) have been approved in the United States since the 1970s. Environmental restrictions, public fears and the relatively cheap availability of fossil fuel combined to kill the market for nuclear plants.

Bush’s determination to talk the world past its nuclear fears is evidenced not only in his bold proposed deals with India and Russia, but also in his willingness to praise France, a country that is not one of his favorites, on this score.

“France has built 58 plants since the 1970s, and now gets 78 percent of its electricity from nuclear power,” Bush said on May 24. “They don’t have to worry about natural gas coming from somewhere else. They worry about it, but they don’t have to worry about it to the extent that we do.”

Driven by events rather than any grand concept of his own, Bush has correctly identified nuclear energy as an important component in reducing global warming and pollution, combating proliferation and cutting the unhealthy dependence of industrial and developing nations alike on suppliers such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Bush must now show that his turn to nuclear is not simply short-term opportunism and ad hoc reaction to crisis, but a well-integrated approach to a safer future.