Green blog: Confessions of a nuclear turncoat

Editor's note: CNN's Hugh Riminton will be writing a daily blog on the issues throughout the week of Going Green: Search for Solutions.

(CNN) -- Psst... wanna hear a secret?

If I ruled the world, you'd soon have nuclear power driving your car.

I'll tell you how in a moment but first indulge me as I confess to a conversion as dramatic -- at least to me -- as a shift in religious belief.

I grew up in the South Island of New Zealand, in a provincial town ringed by hills and snowy mountains, where the town water was proudly drawn, unfiltered, from the aquifers beneath our feet.

This was the country that in the 1970's dispatched two warships to French Polynesia to discourage the French from testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. It worked. They shifted the explosions underground.

France replied, bless them, by sending agents to blow up the Greenpeace flagship in Auckland harbor in 1985, killing a Portuguese photographer -- an act of state-sponsored terrorism that the French and most of the rest of the world seem to have conveniently forgotten. You can read the New Zealand police account here.

New Zealand, with a total population then of just over 3 million, next stood up to the United States. In the 1980's, it stopped visits from U.S. warships if they couldn't declare themselves nuclear weapons-free. The coolness in the U.S.-NZ defense relationship remains to this day.

Ironically, it was a New Zealander, Ernest Rutherford, who first split the atom. He had little faith in nuclear energy but saw early the potential for nuclear weapons. His Nobel prize-winning research helped inspire the Manhattan Project that created the first atomic bombs. But I digress.

As a product of New Zealand's wide open spaces, gamboling through those "Lord of the Rings" mountain valleys like Julie Andrews in a home-knitted woolly jumper, I grew up as anti-nuclear as the next man in gumboots.

And nothing would ever change.

But it has.

For two reasons:

One, the alpine glaciers I romped on as a kid are all but gone. Those mighty rivers of ice are poor and shrunken things these days. I can't escape an awareness that even in my lifetime there has been visible, demonstrable change.

Two, I came to live in China. It would be hypocritical of me to make the argument that the Chinese, and others in emerging nations, should retard their own economic growth so that already wealthy nations can be eased the pain of re-thinking their consumption.

The people of China are getting richer, for sure, but the vast majority remains poor by any western standard.

Energy is the key to their escape from that poverty. And most Chinese energy sources are filthy. I have breathed enough bronchi-scraping Chinese air to know the damage that pollution is doing, be it from coal-fired power stations or the diesel and gasoline vehicles on the grid-locked roads.

So here's the crunch. What keeps the air clean, emits negligible greenhouse gases, and generates enough wholesale reliable power to draw people out of poverty and into better lives?

We all know the answer.

Wind, waves and solar aren't going to do it -- yet.

Coal, gas, oil, landscape-destroying biofuels... they each fail on at least one measure.

Nuclear does have an image problem, no doubt about that.

Half of the Ukraine sets off a Geiger counter like a microwave oven sets off popcorn, thanks to the meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986.

The U.S. had its own near catastrophe with Three Mile Island. That's enough to ensure that no-one in a democracy dare breathe "nuclear" in the same sentence as a specific location without risking riots in the streets.

Even without disasters, there's always nuclear waste.

But as "The Economist" recently observed, disposing of nuclear waste is a "political problem, not a technical one." It can be buried. The problem is finding people willing to have power plants or buried waste -- or both - in their backyards.

But this is a time for new ideas because the old ones aren't working.

If it is any further incentive, plug-in electric cars powered off a nuclear grid have been calculated to run on the equivalent of 25 cents a liter in today's money. That's about a quarter of the price of petrol in the U.S. today (and much less than that in most other parts of the world).

Motoring would be cheap again. And clean.

So here's my question to you: Am I nuts? Let me know. Post a comment in the Sound Off box below.

I look forward to hearing from you.