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GOING GREEN: Confessions of a nuclear turncoat

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 1970s 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.)

New Zealand, with a population of just over 3 million at the time, then stood up to the US. In the 1980s, it stopped visits from US warships if they couldn’t declare themselves free of nuclear weapons. The coolness in the US-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 early on saw 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 that.

But things have changed, 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 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 their gridlocked roads.

So here’s the crunch question: 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, wave and solar power aren’t going to do it — yet. Coal, gas, oil, landscape-destroying biofuels … they each fail on at least one measure.

Nuclear power does have an image problem, no doubt about it. Half of Ukraine sets off a Geiger counter like a microwave oven sets off popcorn, thanks to a little meltdown called Chernobyl.

The US had its own near catastrophe at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. That’s enough to ensure that no one in a democracy would dare breathe “nuclear” in the same sentence as a specific location without risking political strife.

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 a further incentive, plug-in electric cars powered off a nuclear grid have been calculated to run on the equivalent of US$0.25 a liter in today’s money. That’s about a quarter of the price of gas in the US 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. Am I nuts?

Tell me what you think by posting an online comment in the “Sound Off” section below my blog at www.cnn.com/goinggreen.



Hugh Riminton’s “Going Green” will appear in the Taipei Times every day this week until Saturday. CNN’s special coverage of “Going Green: Search for Solutions” continues until Sunday.
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