March 17, 2011
By AUBREY BELFORD
JAKARTA — While the world looks on with trepidation at the nuclear crisis touched off by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, officials in Indonesia, one of the world’s most seismically active countries, are pushing ahead with plans to build the country’s first nuclear power plants.
The nuclear plans, which are still in the early stages, are part of an ambitious proposal by Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, to triple its electricity output by 2025 while weaning itself off imported oil and onto local coal, gas, and renewable and atomic energy. A 2006 decree by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono calls for 5 percent of electricity to come from nuclear and other “new energy and renewable energy” sources by then.
Proposals to build plants have been floated despite years of protests by environmentalists and community activists who argue that Indonesia, an archipelago that largely sits on a number of major fault lines, is too unstable to safely support nuclear power. As images from Japan’s disaster dredge up memories of the 2004 Asian tsunami — in which nearly 170,000 Indonesians died — these concerns have only grown.
“Nuclear power plants are inherently dangerous. And if we build them in a country as prone to disasters as Indonesia, located on the Ring of Fire, the Pacific Rim, we’re creating the potential for a tremendous disaster,” said Arif Fiyanto, a climate and energy campaigner for Southeast Asia at the environmental group Greenpeace.
“Indonesia has probably worse disaster characteristics than Japan,” Mr. Fiyanto said. “Japan has an excellent safety culture and an excellent early warning system. For the time being, Indonesia — we have to be honest — has been left far behind when it comes to this.”
Deeply entrenched corruption and a culture of corner-cutting on other large projects are additional causes for concern, he said.
The most prominent project is a proposal to build two plants with a combined capacity of 18,000 megawatts by 2022 in the provincial government of Bangka-Belitung, between the islands of Sumatra and Borneo.
The government is seeking bids for a feasibility study at the site. Supporters say both sites are far from Indonesia’s most active fault lines. Other sites have been suggested on the densely populated island of Java, as well as Madura, Kalimantan and Sulawesi.
Adiwardojo, the head of nuclear energy development at Indonesia’s National Nuclear Energy Agency, said that concerns about a disaster like that of Japan’s were misplaced because any plants Indonesia would use would have technology far more advanced than that of the four-decade-old reactors at the Fukushima plant in Japan.
Indonesia is carrying out its assessment of potential nuclear sites using standards and guidance from the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mr. Adiwardojo said.
“The important thing isn’t that Indonesia is on the Ring of Fire or there are tsunamis, so we can’t build,” he said. “No, the important thing is that we fulfill the requirements.”
Until the recent crisis, a number of governments in Southeast Asia — which, with the exception of one inactive plant in the Philippines, has no nuclear power — had been seriously reconsidering nuclear power to cope with growing populations and rising affluence.
Events in Japan, however, have led the government of Thailand to announce a freeze on developing the country’s first nuclear power plants, while the Philippines has discarded plans to activate the shelved Bataan reactor. In Malaysia, the government has said it has not yet decided whether to proceed with its nuclear power plans. But in Vietnam, plans to build a series of reactors, the first of which is projected to go online by 2020, have not been disrupted.
In China, meanwhile, the government announced on Wednesday that it was suspending approvals of new nuclear power plants and stepping up inspections at its existing plants.
In Indonesia, the move toward nuclear power has hardly been relentless. The country looks almost certain to miss a target set by Parliament to have nuclear power online between 2015 and 2019.
Another flagship proposal to build a plant on Java’s coastal Muria Peninsula, at the foot of a dormant volcano, has also lost steam in the face of local opposition — although Mr. Adiwardojo says it is still part of the government’s plans.
Within the presidential advisory body tasked with planning Indonesia’s power development, the National Energy Council, opinions are split.
Herman Darnel Ibrahim, a council member, said nuclear power needed to be studied more but was unfeasible in areas where strong community objection persisted. “To make the people happy, that’s the bottom line of development,” he said.
“If we build something and the people are not happy with it, they are worried, then maybe that development is meaningless,” Mr. Ibrahim said.
But for the majority of those drafting Indonesia’s energy future, nuclear power remains a necessity. “We have to consider our energy supply in the long term,” said Herman Agustiawan, another council member. “Our population is 240 million. We have no choice.”
Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting from Beijing.
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