In Indonesia, Japan quake casts shadow over nuclear plant plans

BALONG, Indonesia: Environmental groups campaigning against Indonesia's plan to build some of Southeast Asia's first nuclear power reactors near this poor rice farming village in East Java were given a stark demonstration of their worst fears on July 16 when an earthquake in Japan severely damaged one of the world's largest nuclear power facilities, causing a minor radiation leak.

They had been warning for years against government plans to introduce nuclear power to Indonesia's energy mix because of the risk that an earthquake could rupture a reactor and let nuclear contaminants spill into the surrounding environment.

Officials from the national nuclear energy agency argue that the site where the government wants to build four to six nuclear power plants, on the Muria Peninsula in East Java Province, about 450 kilometers, or 280 miles, east of Jakarta, is one of the most geologically stable parts of an island with a record of violent earthquakes.

But in recent years scientists have discovered a small geological fault below the proposed site, say environmental activists and government officials.

"Under the area where the power plant is planned there is now a minor fracture that didn't exist in the 1990s," said Nur Hidayati, the Jakarta-based climate and energy coordinator for Greenpeace Southeast Asia. "Indonesia has a lot of earthquakes. If a nuclear power plant is built here, the dangers will increase."

Safety and environmental concerns over nuclear power in a country prone to earthquakes, riddled with corruption and known for poor regulatory oversight of public utilities might have some merit. In May last year, an earthquake measuring 5.9 devastated parts of neighboring Central Java, killing more than 5,000 people.

But none of this is likely to deter the Indonesian government from its nuclear energy plans, first proposed by the government when Suharto was president in the early 1990s.

Following the earthquake in Japan, government officials reaffirmed they intended to stick to a timetable that would bring the first nuclear power plant online in 2016.

"It has some impact on us," said Ferhat Aziz, a spokesman for the nuclear energy agency. "Any accident anywhere in the world will have some impact, especially in terms of communicating to the public."

But he added: "We are still going ahead with this plan."

Indonesia, like all its neighbors in Southeast Asia, is facing intense pressure to diversify its energy sources. It wants to shift away from heavily polluting, increasingly expensive and depleting supplies of fossil fuels to more sustainable alternatives.

Nuclear power is emerging as a key part of the future energy mix, not just for Indonesia, but for many of its neighbors in Southeast Asia - a region that until now has eschewed atomic energy.

Despite fears of accidents and the opposition of environmental groups, several Southeast Asian governments have either firm plans to develop nuclear power stations in the coming decade or have begun studies into its potential, in hopes of emulating Northeast Asia's long-established use of nuclear energy.

In a long-term energy plan released last year, government officials in Jakarta estimate that by 2025 about 4 to 5 percent of Indonesia's electricity supply will come from the string of power stations in East Java.

Vietnam has announced that it expects 4.7 percent of its electricity needs to be met by nuclear power by the same date, once it finishes the construction of about four power reactors. The first is due to be completed in 2015.

In Thailand, a national power development plan approved in April envisions nuclear power plants contributing 4 gigawatts to the electricity grid by 2021.

Others could follow suit. In Malaysia, government officials said in February that a move to nuclear energy could not be ruled out if fuel prices continued to rise, although Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak said last week the country had no nuclear development plans. A comprehensive study of future energy needs, including consideration of nuclear, is to be completed in 2010.

The Philippines built a 620-megawatt nuclear power plant at Bataan in the 1980s. But it was never used, mothballed by the administration of President Corazón Aquino in 1986 because of safety fears. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is now putting the nuclear option back on the table. She has said the country should develop skills in nuclear technology as a first step to a possible decision on nuclear power in a decade.

The military junta ruling Myanmar reached an agreement with Russia's atomic energy agency in May to build a research reactor as a possible first step to nuclear electricity generation, although some also fear the secretive state might ultimately have a military program in mind.

This emerging appetite for nuclear energy is consistent with a trend that has made the countries of developing Asia among the biggest consumers of civilian nuclear technology. Of the 29 nuclear power plants under construction worldwide, 16 are in East and South Asia, most of them in China and India, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Analysts say several factors, including the higher price of oil, gas and coal and growing concerns over climate change, have driven more governments in the developing world to consider nuclear power as an option.

"Fuel prices, energy security concerns, environmental concerns - not just climate change, but pollution as well - if you add that up it's really put the nuclear option back into the planning equation," said Hans Holger Rogner, who heads the economic studies section of the IAEA.

But for many of the region's governments, nuclear power remains a hard sell to skeptical publics, despite the industry's reasonably good track record for safety.

The site the Indonesian government has chosen to build its planned reactors is near a volcano dormant for 3,000 years on the Muria Peninsula on Java's northeast coast. Environmental activists have been campaigning in local communities drawing attention to the recently discovered geological fracture and highlighting the earthquake risk.

In Balong, the nearest settlement to the site for the reactors, they have shown villagers a disquieting video documentary about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

"I am afraid the power plant will explode, and even if it doesn't explode, radiation could still leak," said Sutrisno, a 59-year-old schoolmaster whose wooden home is one and a half kilometers, or one mile, from the planned power plant.

Although other countries planning nuclear power plants do not face Indonesia's concerns over earthquakes, safety is the big political issue, and not just among environmentalists and local people. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore said at a meeting of East Asian leaders in January that safety was a worry for the entire region, and not simply for the individual countries embarking on civilian nuclear energy programs.

"We have to understand what the risks are" and "make sure that there are very clear, stringent rules," Lee said, urging Asian leaders to establish a regional safeguards regime.

Indonesia, like many countries of the region, has a longstanding nuclear research program that provides a small pool of experienced talent to draw on for its nuclear power plans. There are about 54 research reactors operating in the region, three of them in Indonesia, including a 30-megawatt reactor at Serpong in West Java. The first Indonesian reactor started operating in 1965.

Hudi Hastowo, the head of the Indonesian nuclear energy agency, said that translates into a verifiable track record of safe management of nuclear facilities under challenging operating conditions.

"Safety in a research reactor is not much different from a power reactor," he said. "In a research reactor we push the power up and down and the risks are greater than running a power reactor, where the power levels are steady."

Nuclear power companies and industry analysts say safeguards in modern reactors mean that disasters like Chernobyl or the core meltdown at the Three Mile Island reactor in the United States in 1979 could not happen again. In earthquake-prone areas, reinforced foundations and building structures are supposed to mitigate the impact of shocks.

"If you are in an earthquake zone you have to build to a different standard than if you are not in an earthquake zone," said Rogner, the IAEA official. "Japan is an example where nuclear capital costs are higher than elsewhere in the world."

But the concerns of environmental groups have only been deepened by the damage caused to Japan's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station, the biggest in the world by electricity output, in the July 16 earthquake and signs that Japanese experts seriously misjudged the geological stability of the site.

"What happened in Japan is a warning," said Dian Abraham, coordinator of Manusia, an anti-nuclear lobby in Jakarta. "It could happen here. The government should stop their plans now."

Indonesian officials say the evaluation of earthquake risk could force more stringent construction standards, and therefore increase costs, but not result in a change of site.

"Greenpeace and other NGOs, international and local, have been singing out loud about this, bring up the Three Mile Island trauma and Chernobyl," said Kusmayanto Kadiman, the Minister for Research and Technology.

"Those factors contributed to Indonesia's decision to have only four to six power plants by 2025. But if I answer the question, 'Will Indonesia definitely go?' Yes. This is a national policy."

A powerful earthquake rocked eastern Indonesia on Thursday, sending residents fleeing from swaying homes and hospitals, the authorities and witnesses said. There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties, The Associated Press reported from Manado, Indonesia.

The quake, which had a magnitude of 6.9, triggered a tsunami warning but the alert was quickly lifted after it became clear that no destructive waves had been generated, the country's geophysics agency said.

The earthquake struck under the Maluku Sea at a depth of 36 kilometers, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site. The quake's epicenter was more than 200 kilometers north of Ternate Island.