Over the past year, I have examined Indonesia’s nuclear outlook through three lenses: diplomacy, culture and structure.

The first explored geopolitical alignments and elite choreography. The second addressed national values, social hierarchy and risk aversion. The third revealed a surplus-heavy grid, stalled industrial growth and underutilized technical expertise.

However, none of these fully confront the deeper issue: What values are driving Indonesia’s nuclear decisions?

Axiology, the study of values, is not peripheral to nuclear policy. It is central. Nuclear energy is not just a technical solution; it is a test of institutional discipline. It demands long-term thinking, zero-defect execution and trustworthy systems.

Even though its environmental and energy benefits are significant, those advantages only materialize in contexts where laws are enforced, oversight is independent and corruption is not systemic. Without that, the safest reactor on paper becomes a public risk.

Indonesia has explored nuclear power since the 1950s, hence, running a nuclear reactor is not a sudden ambition. In recent years, lobbying interest intensified around thorium-based reactors, scientifically attractive but commercially nonexistent.

Even so, ThorCon, a United States-based firm, has continued pursuing a molten salt thorium reactor in Bangka, submitting licensing documents to the Nuclear Energy Regulatory Agency (Bapeten) in early 2025. The project remains in pre-construction.

Public attention later shifted toward small modular reactors (SMRs), which gained stronger narrative traction, focusing on US-based SMRs. In 2023, PLN Indonesia Power signed a cooperation agreement with the US Trade and Development Agency to explore the deployment of NuScale’s SMR in West Kalimantan.

However, no SMR from the US has yet reached commercial deployment anywhere in the world. And more importantly, no American-designed reactor was among the 52 nuclear construction starts globally between 2017 and 2024, according to the International Energy Agency. Of those, 25 used Chinese designs, and 23 used Russian.

Nevertheless, Indonesia, despite having no operational nuclear plant, has aligned itself with an unproven platform, bypassing the global designs that are already being built and delivered.

Everything else held constant, suppose we accept the decision. The technology has been chosen. The contracts will proceed. But that still leaves unanswered the more fundamental question: Is the system morally and institutionally prepared to carry it out?

That is the axiological question, and it reveals where the deeper disqualification lies: Not in the reactor design or technical parameters, but in the culture and structure tasked with implementation.

Nuclear energy is not a symbolic infrastructure. It does not tolerate ambiguity, discretion, or improvisation. It requires inflexible regulation, full procedural discipline and long-horizon accountability. One deviation from protocol, one overlooked weld, one silenced inspection and the damage is irreversible.

In Indonesia, procurement flexibility and regulatory leniency are normalized. Laws are adjusted, audits are muted, and oversight is often formal rather than functional. This pattern is well-documented across the public sectors, with 40 percent of graft cases involving opaque contracting practices, limited disclosure requirements and muted enforcement.

Whereas that might be survivable in toll roads or ports, it is existentially risky in nuclear.

The problem is not structural or technical. That conversation is already late in the game. The real problem lies in the foundational institution, the political culture, regulatory habits and ethical boundaries that define how infrastructure is actually executed.

Indonesia’s corruption record affects planning, tendering, licensing and enforcement. Although agencies like Bapeten exist, they operate under broader political norms that permit circumvention. Safety culture in nuclear energy is not procedural. It is ethical.

This is not conjecture. According to Transparency International’s (2024) Corruption Perceptions Index, Indonesia scored 37 out of 100, placing it 99th out of 180 countries worldwide. This ranking reflects a consistent pattern of institutional vulnerability. For a technology like nuclear, where accountability must be absolute, such a climate is not a neutral background, it is a direct threat to safe implementation.

This institutional weakness persists despite the fact that Indonesia has produced a significant number of nuclear engineers, trained at prestigious institutions abroad and fully qualified to operate and regulate nuclear systems. The technical expertise exists. The personnel exist. What is missing is a system that protects their roles, respects their warnings and operates according to the standards they were trained to uphold.

When expertise is forced to coexist with discretionary governance, the outcome is not professionalism, it is erosion.

Many large-scale projects in Indonesia have been driven not by operational necessity but by narrative, what they represent, not how they function. Nuclear energy cannot follow that logic. It is not a branding device. It is not a ribbon-cutting moment.

It is a 100-year system that must be governed with stability, integrity and transparency across political cycles. This is not simply a matter of competence. It is a matter of national values.

Moreover, even if institutional integrity were hypothetically assumed, the financial barrier is severe. The rupiah has fallen to Rp17,000 per US dollar, its weakest in 17 years, making imported technology far more expensive.

Indonesia’s development allocation accounts for only 17 percent of the state budget. Public debt is already high, with obligations to multilateral and bilateral lenders. At the same time, new fiscal priorities like the free nutritious meal program demand substantial, sustained funding.

Although these programs address essential social needs, they further constrain fiscal space for high-risk, capital-intensive ventures like nuclear. Still, the deeper disqualification is not financial. It is axiological. In a corrupt system, even the most advanced technology becomes compromised.

Supporters of nuclear power are right to highlight its long-term value: Zero emissions, high base-load capacity and carbon neutrality. I support those goals. However, nuclear energy cannot succeed in systems that cannot be trusted. A reactor does not run on engineering alone, it runs on institutional ethics. The risks are not technical, they are political and moral.

Indonesia must stop framing nuclear adoption as a question of capability or technology choice. The real issue is not whether nuclear is needed or not needed, or whether we can build it or not, we can, technologically and human capital wise.

What remains unresolved is whether our institutional and ethical systems are capable of supporting any nuclear path at all. And for those who observe religious obligations, this decision carries consequences not only in this world but in the one they believe follows.

In this case, the disqualification is not in the design. It is in the values behind the decision.

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The writer is an affiliated alumnus of MIT Sloan School of Management and an alumnus of the Nuclear Engineering Department, School of Engineering, Gadjah Mada University