Quake-prone Indonesia’s first nuclear power plant plan stokes safety fears
While some people see the proposed project on an uninhabited island with ‘pride’, others warn of safety issues
Some members of the public and experts, however, have voiced concerns about the risks of a nuclear disaster in the quake-prone country, despite one of the leading candidate sites being an uninhabited island considered not to be in an active seismic zone.
The government began discussing the revival of the plan last year as it seeks to reshape its energy policy. Deputy Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Yuliot told an international nuclear forum in Jakarta in December that a new energy strategy would “explicitly” require the use of nuclear energy “to balance the energy mix and achieve decarbonisation targets”.
Plans to build nuclear power plants were first made in the mid-1990s under then president Suharto.