beyondbrics

Indonesia will go ahead with a feasibility study for a nuclear power plant, even as China has put plans on hold in the wake of Japan’s nuclear crisis.

“There are many places in Indonesia that are safe,” Ferhat Aziz of the National Atomic Energy Agency said in an interview on Thursday. “We are not so worried. Japan is a different story.” But experts are worried – not only about Indonesia’s regular earthquakes, one of which triggered a massive tsunami in December 2004, but also about weak government institutions and corruption.

“There is acute regulatory risk and you want the highest possible level of transparency, robustness and integrity,” said Richard Tanter of Australia’s Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability. “Those are not phrases that come to mind with the current Indonesian government, or the previous ones for that matter.”

He added: “Japan is a country of extraordinary regulation when it puts its mind to it. Indonesia is not. Its powers of enforcement are very weak.”

But Aziz insisted Indonesia was safe: “There are no places in Japan that are not prone to earthquakes. There are plenty of places without earthquakes in Indonesia.”

Indonesia’s nuclear ambitions date back decades to the era of the late dictator Suharto but are due to take shape in coming years with the construction of a power reactor on Banka island, between Sumatra and Borneo, where Aziz argues a plant would be outside the “Ring of Fire”.

Indonesia suffers from rotating “brownouts” and sudden blackouts are fairly common in Jakarta (pictured). The economy is powering ahead at more than 6 per cent annual growth, with demand for electricity growing at about 9 per cent.

The government’s energy options include coal and gas fired power plants (Indonesia is the world’s largest and third largest exporters of those natural resources, respectively), geothermal, and other renewable sources of energy.

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Nuclear power file, beyondbrics
Indonesia file, beyondbrics