Indonesian cleric group rejects plans for a nuclear plant in Java

A group of Islamic clerics are against the Indonesian government’s plans to build a nuclear power plant in Central Java to provide an alternative source of energy. The clerics met over the weekend to discuss the issue and felt that building a nuclear power plant in earthquake-prone Central Java would bring more dangers than benefits to the people. There were concerns about the project operator’s ability to ensure safety of the plant. The plan is also controversial because of frequent earthquakes in the country. Indonesia plans to start construction of the nuclear power plant, on the foothills of Mount Muria by 2010 and to have it up and running by 2016. What is the likelihood of Indonesia actually following through with plans to build the plant? A question Shereena Sajeed put to Mr Jim Green, a National Nuclear Campaigner for Friends in Australia.
JG: It’s very hard to say. There were plans in the 1980s and the 1990s and they were abandoned for various reasons, including political opposition, Java being an earthquake-prone island and various other reasons. But the Indonesian government does seem to be more serious this time so only time will tell I think. But there have been major protests in Indonesia involving thousands of people and those protests have been largely because of the problems of the earthquake in Japan and the impacts it had on the nuclear power plant.
And just how essential is the plant as an alternative source of energy in Indonesia?
JG: Well it’s at great risk of being a white elephant and one precedent here is the reactor that was built in the Philippines at the cost of 2 billion dollars and has never generated a single watt of useful electricity because of safety concerns over that reactor. So that’s the sort of problem I’d be worried about in Indonesia. And of course there’s not a high standard of nuclear safety in Indonesia by any stretch of the imagination and Java is a highly-populated and earthquake-prone so it’s an ill-conceived plan and we can’t help but wonder if there might be a military agenda drive in this. I think a number of countries in South-east Asia, including Australia are nervous that other countries are going to develop supposedly civil nuclear programmes which will give them the capacity to produce nuclear weapons if they decided to go down that path. What steps are being taken to ensure the safe handling of radioactive waste from the plant?
JG: Well eventually nothing. Indonesia doesn’t have any significant nuclear industry at the moment. They’ve only got a small research reactor which doesn’t produce much waste so they’ve got very little experience with managing waste. They don’t have any operating nuclear waste repository so one thing that is certainly an issue in Australia is a possibility that Australia might be asked not only to sell uranium to Indonesia but also to take back the high-level nuclear waste.
What kind of dangers do earthquakes pose to a nuclear plant like this?
JG: There isn’t a lot of experience of nuclear plants being exposed to very serious earthquakes. We can take the precedent of the recent serious earthquake at the Japanese nuclear plant and that caused dozens of problems. Thankfully none of them involved intensely radioactive core of the nuclear reactor at that Japanese plant. But there were many problems including radioactive waste, barrels falling over and their contents spilling out. Also, radioactive liquids spilling into the ocean so a whole range of problems. And of course the issued with Indonesia’s plans for nuclear power is that Java is so highly-populated with a population of nearly 200 million people as I understand it, so any accident is going to be especially catastrophic because of the high population density.
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