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Leaders of Central European nations who gathered for a regional energy conference here Monday offered a rare bit of consensus in Europe’s raging energy and environmental debates: They want to go big in nuclear power and by and large, they want to do it alone.

“Without nuclear energy, our freedom is at stake,” Mirek Topolanek, the former Czech prime minister, told delegates from academia and the private sector at the 4th Energy Forum, set to discuss regional energy cooperation.

Topolanek, reflecting public frustration with Russian-Ukrainian gas transport skirmishes that left many residents of Central European countries cold both in 2006 and last winter, cast much of his speech in comments wary of Russia and its virtual monopoly on gas to Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland. He quoted Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov who 30 years ago argued the only savior from dominance by Moscow is energy independence through nuclear power.

“We have done nothing to diversify,” Topolanek said, offering harsh words for the European Union, which he said has abandoned energy policy in favor of environmental rhetoric. “We have to diversify. It is a condition for keeping sovereignty.”

Viktor Orban, a parliamentarian and former prime minister of Hungary, offered a similar assessment. He said the EU has created a “stealth energy policy” by subverting it to environmental goals and offers “much words and very little deeds.”

“We must use nuclear energy,” Orban told the conference, emphasizing as well the importance of gas pipelines such as the planned $7 billion Nabucco that would transit Turkey and deliver up to 31 billion cubic meters a year. Nabucco would meet roughly a third of EU needs, but the sources of the gas in the Middle East and Central Asia are yet to be fully identified. “We have to find alternative routes of supply.”

Central European nations already rely heavily on nuclear power. Hungary has one Soviet-era nuclear reactor providing a third of its needs and the Czech Republic has three, providing perhaps half of its energy. The Czech Republic also has domestic sources of uranium.

The calls by both politicians for unilateral nuclear moves stood in contrast to the stated goals of the conference and the policy recipes of many business and civil society leaders who called both for greater regional cooperation and emphasis on new technologies to combat climate change.

Hans Larsen, director of Denmark’s National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy, offered a preview of ideas expected to be center stage at next month’s global climate change conference in Copenhagen. He argued for greater energy efficiency, cooperation around regional advantages such as ample solar energy in southern Europe and a paucity of it in the north. Larsen also called for schemes to make intelligent use of varying resources such as wind power. Denmark, he noted, has ample wind power that is not always available. Thus it provides its excess on windy days to hydropower-rich Norway and Sweden, which can then preserve water impounded behind dams. When the winds die down in Denmark, the Swedes and Norwegians open the turbines and energy consumers never experience a break in service, he said.

Much attention focused on the Nabucco project, backed by Turkey but potentially overshadowed by Russia’s “South Stream,” to which Turkey has offered its Black Sea continental shelf. Nabucco’s Austrian-based managing director Reinhard Mitschek insisted the pipeline would commence construction on schedule next year and be complete by 2014. But many participants questioned Nabucco’s feasibility if South Stream is constructed first.

One passionate advocate of Nabucco was Georgia’s Giorgi Vashakmadze, head of the London-based “White Stream” project, which envisions a pipeline under the Caspian Sea that could deliver Turkmenistan gas to Nabucco via Georgia. Caspian gas reserves, rivaling those of Russia and the Gulf, offer both the promise of European independence from Moscow and a low-polluting energy source to enable Europe to comply with climate change goals, he said.

“Concurrent development of White Stream is to offer viability to Nabucco,” Vashakmadze said.

Alexander Babakov, deputy chairman of Russia’s legislature the State Duma, offered a novel solution to the problem of pipeline dependency. He suggested rather than seeking pipelines that snake around sovereign borders, an alternative might be pipelines under multiple sovereigns. “Pipelines under the territorial control of Ukraine could be controlled by international consortia,” Babakov said.