Quake-prone Indonesia’s first nuclear power plant plan stokes safety fears

Coal-dependent Indonesia is reviving decades-old plans to build nuclear power plants that were put on hold following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, as it seeks to meet its decarbonisation targets.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.Although Indonesia in 2014 designated nuclear power as a “last option” as an energy source following the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant caused by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, the country shifted to treating it as a “strategic choice” last year.The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources says that it aims to have Indonesia’s first nuclear power plant operational by 2032 at the earliest, with a target for nuclear energy to account for up to 12.1 per cent of the primary energy mix by 2060, with an installed capacity of 35-42 gigawatts.