Indonesia to be a nuclear power

By Terry Lacey

(December 05, Jakarta, Sri Lanka Guardian) Indonesian State Research and Technology Minister Suharna Surapranata, in the new Cabinet for less than two months announced quietly in Jakarta at a meeting of the Nuclear Energy Regulatory Agency (BAPETEN) that “The plan to build a nuclear power plant must go on”. (The Jakarta Post 04.12.09).

He said BAPETEN and the National Atomic Energy Agency (BATAN) are currently training staff and he expects BATAN to run the plant “when it opens in 2016”. But some industry experts say this will take longer than he thinks, maybe until 2020, or later.

Surprising to some, Indonesia already reportedly has more than a hundred trained nuclear technologists, three working research reactors and is supplying components to the nuclear power station now being built in Finland.

But nuclear power cannot work in Indonesia without social and political modernization to provide the civic culture supports required to approve, regulate and sustain it. As General De Gaulle discovered earlier on in France nuclear power is a sure route to modernization. It forces a country to change. Perhaps President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono already understands that.

Opposition has to be overcome locally at the first Muria site in Java, nationally, and in ASEAN. Nonetheless, the argument that Indonesia must become a nuclear power is mathematically irrefutable.

This is based on energy demand and supply and social and administrative behavior in a country whose population will reach 285 million by mid-century.

The Indonesian electricity crisis is the product of these conditions, combined with logistical problems on energy distribution and fuel supply across this giant archipelago and increasingly intense competition for any kind of fuel.

Should coal or LNG gas producers export for good profits on a bouncing back world market or supply a poorer energy-starved downstream domestic market in a country without adequate ports, railways, roads or pipelines?

Indonesia only has about 30 Gigawatts (GWe) of power in the national grid right now and needs an additional 5 GWe every year, for the foreseeable future. So it needs 55 Gwe by 2015 and 80 GWe by 2020.

This does not include cleaning up 20,000 smaller private power stations in commerce and industry, nor the 35 percent of the Indonesian population (82 million people) who are not yet grid-connected and have little or no power.

The Muria plant is projected to produce 4000 Mwe (4 GWe). To make 4000 MWe from renewable energy Indonesia would need 1,200 successful Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) or Equipment Procurement and Construction (EPC) contracts, covering mini-hydro, biomass, wind, solar and geothermal technologies, with half successfully financed and 60 projects finished a year.

At the moment neither government nor industry could do anything like this. Such targets are impossible with present regulatory frameworks, public administration and public and private sector capacities.

The second proposed 10,000 MWe accelerated electricity program to try and cope with the black-outs and electricity crises in Jakarta and the provinces is based 42 percent on developing geothermal energy.

But no-one has ever made a geothermal power plant the way they propose, via exploration and development agreements with local governments, which cannot yet offer investors recourse on exploration, commercial and political risks without guarantees which do not yet exist, assuming they had expertise and capacities they do not yet have.

And Asia is sold on mass consumption, big shopping malls, and economic growth, and to show the West it can be the best, which needs vast increases in demand for energy. That is why most of the worlds´ new nuclear power stations will be in Asia.

This is a high volume high technology solution for societies which cannot shift fast enough to lower volume growth and greener consumption patterns.

Pit textbook development theory against modern social and political practice, and the textbook will lose. For the people to win any other way would require unimaginably greater efforts than are already being made. So renewable and green energy targets can only be met if nuclear power is included. And Indonesia has to be accepted as a nuclear power.

-Sri Lanka Guardian