Early this year, France's state energy and environment agency was set to publish a study that found the country could realistically abandon nuclear reactors and rely completely on renewable power in decades to come, reports Reuters.
But the presentation was scrapped under political pressure, with energy minister Ségolène Royal later saying the agency needed to be "coherent" with government targets.
The episode illustrated the tensions surrounding energy policy in a country steeped in nuclear power since the 1970s and which relies on it for three-quarters of its electricity - more than any other nation.
Any suggestion of abandoning the atom is unthinkable for many in France, where scientists played a key role in discovering radioactivity, atomic energy is broadly accepted by all major political parties except the greens and the nuclear industry employs 220,000 people.
Ahead of the U.N. climate change conference in Paris next week, the French position exposes the lack of any consistent European policy on how best to switch from polluting fossil fuels to cleaner energy and reduce carbon emissions.
In Germany, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster led to an exit from nuclear and a massive switch to renewables, while many other countries also decided to phase out nuclear.
But French lawmakers in July voted only to cap nuclear capacity at current levels and to reduce its share in the power mix to 50 percent by 2025 - without announcing any concrete steps towards that goal. They also backed a government target for renewables to generate 40 percent of power by 2030.
The study by state energy and environment agency ADEME - tasked with leading France's energy transition - had found, by contrast, that France could switch to 100 percent renewable energy for power generation by 2050 at a cost similar to sticking with atomic energy for 50 percent of its power.
"We show that a hypothesis that most stakeholders thought was unthinkable, is actually technically possible," ADEME head Bruno Lechevin wrote.
The report was finally published in October - months after lawmakers had approved the government's energy transition law - and included a carefully worded introduction by Lechevin, saying it was "an exploratory scientific study, not a political scenario".