A neighbour's nuclear indifference

John McBeth Straits Times 8 Apr 11;

WHILE governments around the world, including some at no risk of earthquakes and tsunamis, are using the Japan tsunami disaster to review their nuclear power plans, scientists and nuclear proponents in Indonesia remain unfazed.

This lackadaisical attitude, as much as the perceived hazards, bother those concerned about the ability of the Indonesian government to put the proper safeguards in place and, more importantly, to ensure these are strictly enforced.

Sticking to the rules has never been an Indonesian strong point, as shown by the slack performance of its regulatory agencies. Nervous neighbours like Singapore and Australia - and a good number of Indonesians - ask why a nuclear watchdog would be any different.

With the country's National Atomic Energy Agency (Batan) refusing to bat an eyelid over the lessons to be learnt from Japan, it has been left to Environment Minister Gusti Muhammad Hatta and the head of the state-owned power utility to wag a cautionary finger.

They argue that in a country rich in natural gas, coal, hydro, geothermal, coal-bed methane and other forms of renewable energy - some barely tapped for electricity generation - nuclear should become an option only when the country's natural resources are dwindling.

Indonesia does have a law on its books allowing the construction of four 1,000MW reactors. The initial plan was to site these on the Muria peninsula in the heavily populated and seismically active Central Java region.

Some of the strongest opposition has come from Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia's largest Muslim organisation, which issued a shock fatwa in 2007 declaring the Muria project to be haram, or forbidden under Islamic jurisprudence.

A nuclear complex on the peninsula may not be at risk of a tsunami, or perhaps even a major quake, but it would lie in the path of potential pyroclastic flows from the Muria volcano a short distance away. The plant would also sit on compressed volcanic ash, making it vulnerable to liquefaction.

While Muria is last known to have erupted in 160BC and lies well to the north of Java's main volcanic chain, the complex is bisected by several fault lines running north from the Java trench off the southern coast.

With Muria looking increasingly unlikely, Batan is considering a plan to move the project to Bangka island, just to the south of Singapore and on the other side of Sumatra from one of the world's most volatile tectonic boundaries. It recently called tenders for a feasibility study of the new site.

The Bangka-Belitung provincial government may seem more welcoming, but with Singapore officials pointedly calling for Asean-wide nuclear safety standards, little is known about how much the plan has been socialised among Bangka's 600,000 people.

Mr Hatta, whose ministry is responsible for issuing environmental impact studies for strategic businesses, including nuclear power plants, told reporters recently: 'It is not easy to provide assurances to a public that is sceptical about nuclear reactors.'

Even President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has reservations. 'Nuclear development is impossible in areas with opposition,' he told anxious voters during a 2009 election speech in Central Java. 'If there are still other alternatives, we will not use nuclear resources.'

Unable to meet an earlier 2017 start-up deadline, Batan has lost a number of nuclear scientists to Malaysia, one of four South-east Asian nations that have notified the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of their intention to develop nuclear-powered electricity.

But the biggest obstacle may turn out to be cost. Current estimates for a 4,000MW nuclear complex are in the US$10 billion (S$12.6 billion) range, more than twice that for a similar-sized coal-fired plant.

Mr Richard Tanter, director of Australia's Nautilus Institute, believes the new levels of safety demanded by the ongoing Fukushima emergency will inflate costs further, even for more modern pressurised-water and still-untried Generation Four reactors.

In a 2009 paper, Mr Tanter and two co-authors said Indonesia's handling of the nuclear hot-potato is a test of the power of public opinion in a new democracy, and of the capacity of the government to assess risk appropriately.

A key political lesson of the new era is that energy policy - power generation in particular - lies at the heart of a remarkably wide spectrum of issues, ranging from governance and transparency to climate change and the role of civil society in policy formation.

'In Indonesia's case, two concerns in particular may undermine the regime, including the ongoing corruption within the Indonesian government and the seeming impunity of many senior government officials and political elite in the face of evident conflicts of interest and legal obligation,' Mr Tanter said in his paper.

Many find it particularly disturbing that all government and IAEA volcanic and seismic studies of the Muria project have been kept out of the public domain for more than three decades.

Perhaps with its hands full dealing with the global fallout from the Fukushima crisis, the Vienna-based agency did not respond to e-mail queries about the studies or whether it has signed off on the Bangka feasibility plan.

Nuclear energy is here to stay
Business Times Editorial 8 Apr 11;

TO SAY that recent events in Fukushima, Japan have dented confidence in nuclear energy would be an understatement. The reactions around the world have ranged from extreme concern to near-panic as Japan - the only country ever to suffer the horrific consequences of a nuclear attack - continues to struggle to contain the radioactive fallout from its reactors, almost a month after the devastating earthquake and tsunami which have left a trail of death and destruction in the northeast of the country.

Radiation is being carried through the atmosphere and by ocean currents to as far as the West Coast of North America and getting into the global food chain. Such developments are leading countries to take a serious second look at nuclear energy, which once promised a way to reduce dependence on environmentally destructive fossil fuels.

China has shelved the construction of new nuclear reactors, while some developed Western nations which were eager to reduce their dependence on oil and coal are reviewing their nuclear energy plans and plants. In Germany, the ruling Christian Democrats have lost an important state election over the nuclear issue, while closer to home, South-east Asian states with ambitious long-term plans to tap nuclear power are re-thinking their positions.

Conflicting and confusing news about Japan's containment efforts has simply added to the concern about nuclear energy which currently provides some 12 per cent of the world's energy needs.

The industry's proponents argue that quakes and tsunamis aside, nuclear energy is the cleanest source - with zero emissions - and the best choice for a world grappling with the impact of greenhouse gases on the environment and climate. Nuclear energy also offers the best input-output ratio amongst all energy sources: a small quantity of nuclear fuel produces large amounts of energy. Unlike other energy sources, nuclear plants can be located virtually anywhere - although the wisdom of locating them near earthquake and tsunami-prone areas is obviously being questioned.

Besides the environmental, economic and political fallout from Japan, detractors point to the high cost of building plants and the difficulty in managing their dangerous radioactive waste. There is also the issue of the catastrophic clean-up costs should something go wrong, as has happened three times in as many decades.

The bottomline is that there is no easy answer on how best to tap clean energy. We know that dependence on fossil fuels cannot go on forever. But the development of other environmentally 'clean' fuel sources has reached nowhere near the scale needed for widespread commercial use. The nearest thing to clean energy now is natural gas, but this is not an inexhaustible resource either.

Like it or not, nuclear energy is here to stay. The only question is, how do we make it more safe and foolproof.