JAKARTA — Civil society organizations in Indonesia staged protests in late April to raise awareness of a planned nuclear plant near Pontianak, capital of West Kalimantan province on the island of Borneo. “We are advocating that West Kalimantan be kept away from the threat of a nuclear radiation disaster. Indonesia is not Chernobyl,” said Hendrikus Adam, executive director of the West Kalimantan chapter of the Indonesia Forum for the Environment, a national NGO known as Walhi, referring to the site of a notorious 1986 nuclear meltdown in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Indonesia’s first experimental nuclear reactor, the TRIGA Mark II, opened in the city of Bandung in February 1965. Since then, however, the world’s fourth-largest country has yet to open a full-fledged nuclear power station. In March 2023, Indonesia and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) signed a partnership agreement to develop small modular reactor technology for the archipelago’s power network. The agreement included a $1 million grant to PLN, the state-owned power utility, to carry out feasibility studies on a nuclear reactor. PLN has proposed a 462-megawatt facility in West Kalimantan, which would use technology supplied by NuScale Power OVS, a publicly traded company based in Oregon in the U.S. In capacity terms, that represents almost one-tenth of the giant Paiton coal-fired complex in East Java province, a mainstay of the Java-Bali power grid. Walhi’s action to reject plans to build a nuclear power plant in West Kalimantan in front of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post Indonesia civil society groups raise concerns over proposed Borneo nuclear reactor first appeared on EnviroLink Network.