Indonesia makes nuclear friends

Thursday, 11 January 2007 In early December, Indonesia signed agreements to cooperate on civil nuclear energy with both Russia and South Korea.

On 4 December President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told his Korean counterpart, Roh Moo-Hyun and the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry  that although Indonesia had not officially decided to go ahead with a nuclear power program, it would nevertheless seek cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Moo-Hyun explained that South Korea has the skills to offer help to Indonesia in developing nuclear power, that the two countries had “vast potential for cooperation” and that he hoped they could use the “opportunity to cooperate in the field of nuclear energy.”

Those words came only days after the Russian-Indonesian summit in Moscow, where an agreement was signed on 1 December by Hassan Wirajuda, Indonesian minister for Foreign Affairs, and Sergei Kiriyenko, head of the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency (Rosatom). Both Yudhoyono  and Russian President Vladimir Putin were in attendance.

Kiriyenko said that Russia has a “broad range of competitive technologies which could be of interest.” He added that besides conventional VVER pressurized water reactors already under construction in India and China and planned for Bulgaria, Russian firms could supply portable barge-mounted nuclear reactors to supply electricity or heat to desalinate seawater.

Indonesia discussed the deployment of floating power plants with Russia in the 1990s, but the first such power station is actually under construction now and destined for use at the Severodvinsk shipyard in Arkhangelsk, northwestern Russia.

Conventional nuclear power plants under discussion for Indonesia include some 7,000 MWe (about six reactors) to be built on the northern coast of the island of Java. It is hoped that the first of those units could begin operation by 2015.