T

he National Nuclear Energy Agency (Batan) says it will go ahead with a plan to build a nuclear power plant in Bangka Belitung province despite concerns on the safety of nuclear energy, especially after the ongoing nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan.

“The Bangka Belitung province is still the most feasible area [for a nuclear power plant] based on geological data from the state’s geology agency under the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry,” Batan head Hudi Hastowo told reporters prior to a multilateral forum on nuclear energy issues at the Sari Pan Pacific Hotel in Jakarta on Tuesday.

Hudi said an abundance of granite in Bangka Belitung’s geological structure was one of the main reasons for choosing the province, which was located off the east coast of Sumatra, as a potential site for a nuclear power plant.

Layers of granite in the Earth’s crust have been renowned as a deep geological repository for radioactive nuclear waste. Countries such as South Korea, Sweden and Switzerland have used granite as repositories, either for research for nuclear waste.

Another reason for choosing Bangka Belitung was its strategic location for distributing electricity to the islands of Java and Sumatra, the source of the largest demand for electricity in Indonesia, Hudi said.

“The fact that the islands of Bangka and Belitung are surrounded by shallow seas no more than 30 to 40 meters deep also played a major part in the decision,” he added, saying that the condition would significantly lessen the risk of tsunamis striking the plant site.

Hudi said that Batan finished feasibility and site studies in Bangka Belitung in January and had planned to announce the results of the bidding to build the power plant in March.

“However, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster [on March 11] created political and social situations that were inconvenient for announcing the results,” Hudi said, adding that the agency was still waiting for an appropriate time to announce the winner of the bidding.

Hudi said that the ongoing disaster at Fukushima had created a spike in public resistance to the use of nuclear energy as an alternative source of electricity.

He said that according to a limited survey the agency conducted in May, out of the 500 Bangka Belitung respondents, 35 percent approved of the establishment of a nuclear power plant in the province, 35 percent resisted the idea, while the rest were undecided.

The approval rate was down from 59.7 percent in a similar survey in September 2010 that involved 3,000 respondents from 22 cities and regencies in seven provinces in Java and Bali.

“I do believe that the Fukushima incident significantly influenced public perceptions of the safety of nuclear energy,” Hudi said.

“However, I want to emphasize that the incident has given the nuclear industry worldwide many lessons for future development and that the International Atomic Energy Agency has stated that safety is of the utmost importance,” he said.

Lessons learned from the Fukushima disaster included anticipating station blackouts when the entire plant would lose power, significantly increasing the possibility of a meltdown, he said.

“The planned plant will be equipped with mobile generators to anticipate such blackouts,” Hudi said.

Another lesson from Fukushima was a requirement for a more effective cooling system to isolate heat from a potential meltdown, he said.

“If a meltdown happens, the nuclear reaction will stop but the resulting heat may still occur. Our plan is to equip the plant in Bangka Belitung with a system that can eliminate such heat as soon as possible,” he added. (mim)