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Looming Power Shortage Calls for Nuclear, Batan Says
Ismira Lutfia | October 22, 2011

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Serigala-Berbulu-Domba
5:44pm Oct 22, 2011

If a nuclear power plant is constructed on Bangka Island that should certainly give a significant jolt to transmigrant numbers heading for Papua.


devine
5:32pm Oct 22, 2011

Well, what else do you expect a "nuclear scientist" to say? Hope our Govt is just smart enough... if developed countries already have difficulties to operate and maintain nuclear plant just imagine here...

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Building a nuclear power plant in Indonesia should be considered a necessity rather than a political bargaining chip, given the prospect of an imminent power shortage, one of the nation’s top nuclear scientists said on Friday.

Sarwiyana Sastratenaya, head of nuclear energy development at the National Nuclear Energy Agency (Batan), said it was forecast that Indonesia would need 148 gigawatts of installed electricity capacity in 2025, increasing to 550 GW in 2050.

That, he said, could be hard to achieve, pointing out that current installed capacity was 35 GW.

“Let’s just be realistic and put politics aside: in less than 15 years, we’ll need to get more than 100 gigawatts of electricity online,” he told the Jakarta Globe.

As recently as early this year, some of that extra capacity was widely expected to come from a proposed 10-GW nuclear plant to be built in Bangka-Belitung province. However, since the nuclear crisis that gripped Japan following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami there, the plan has faced increased opposition and criticism.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has also expressed reservations about nuclear power, saying in June that “if we could build energy sources other than a nuclear power plant, we would choose those energy sources.”

But Sarwiyana said that given the current levels of electricity supply being developed in the country, Indonesia would not be able to meet the predicted demand on time if it wrote off nuclear power completely. As a result, he said, the country would suffer a power shortage.

Batan is expected to carry out seismic testing next year on Bangka Island, the planned site of the plant. Sarwiyana said that contrary to some media reports, the tests were not meant to simulate the effects of an earthquake hitting the area.

“This is a normal and routine seismic test to determine the types of layers beneath the ground and to see whether there is a tectonic plate at the proposed site,” he said.

This, he added, is a common geophysics technique also used in the mining industry.

Irman, a scientist who was at the Bangka site with Sarwiyana, said explosives would be placed at points 20 meters below the ground in order to blast away the surface layers and reveal the geological structures beneath.

Each detonator, he said, weighs 1.5 kilograms and is classified as a low explosive.

“We will plant the explosives in 300 spots that are 75 meters apart over a 25-square-kilometer area,” Irman said. He added that the seismic testing was expected to be done in the first quarter of next year. “But we won’t detonate them all at once,” he said. “We’ll do it over a two-month period.”

Sarwiyana said Bangka was regarded as the most feasible location for a nuclear reactor, given that it did not lie within the so-called Ring of Fire that stretches across the western edge of Sumatra and northern Java, an area that is highly prone to volcanic activity, earthquakes and tsunamis.

However, he said the testing needed to be done to determine just how safe Bangka was.

“Once we locate the tectonic plate, we can determine when it was last active and predict when it will be active again,” he said.