Asian Countries Embrace Nuclear Energy

By WILLIAM BOOT.

BANGKOK—Choices are rapidly dwindling if you want to live in a nuclear-free country in the East Asia-Pacific Rim region.

New Zealand, Cambodia, Laos and Brunei are your options—everywhere else is either operating, researching or planning nuclear power.

While the Western countries that first embraced nuclear energy are now hand-ringing over the issue because of safety worries, Asia is planning massive development of the controversial fuel source. It’s seen by an increasing number of countries as the only way to meet mushrooming electricity demand and limit or reduce pollution blamed for global warming.

Climate change is forecast by environmental scientists as likely to cause more devastation affecting more people in Asia than anywhere else on Earth.

But the news this week that both Malaysia and Singapore are now seriously looking at the nuclear option has set alarm bells ringing anew among others who believe building scores of nuclear reactor plants across a crowded region is too dangerous and is not being thought through carefully enough.

“The larger environmental issues about nuclear energy relate to waste which remains hazardous for thousands of years, without a real solution,” said Simon Tay of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs.

The chairman of the regional think tank warns that a number of factors often combine to make nuclear power a less attractive option for generating electricity than more conventional fuels such as oil, gas and coal.

Initial development costs are extraordinarily expensive and the supposed savings over other fuels never take into account the disposal of dangerous nuclear waste and the eventual decommissioning of plants after a 20 or 25-year life, Tay argues in a report.

While debate on a possible nuclear power plant in overcrowded Singapore is muted, there’s an outcry in Malaysia this week following the announcement by the government that it has “no option” but to embrace nuclear energy. Most of Malaysia ’s electricity at present is generated by natural gas drawn from offshore undersea reserves, which are finite.

Lim Guan Eng, the secretary-general of the opposition Democratic Action Party, said the public had a right to know “what assurances can be given in relation to safety and environment following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant accident in Ukraine that claimed 56 lives and resulted in 4,000 cancer deaths.”

The 10-country Southeast Asian grouping Asean—moving ever closer economically if not politically—has a standing policy on remaining a nuclear weapons-free zone, but has no policy on nuclear-fueled energy.

Only underdeveloped Laos and Cambodia among the 10 have not yet announced any nuclear ambitions.

Burma is persistently reported to be secretly developing a nuclear reactor capability in a remote location with North Korean and Russian technical help.

Just last month, Thailand reaffirmed plans to build two nuclear plants as part of its electricity development plan up to 2030.

And two of Southeast Asia’s rapidly developing countries, Indonesia and Vietnam, where electricity shortages are acute already have advanced plans for nuclear power. Indonesia has allocated US $8 billion to build four plants. Vietnam says it will have at least one nuclear plant functioning by 2020.

The World Nuclear Association says Asia is the “main region in the world where electricity generating capacity and specifically nuclear power is growing significantly.”

Across East and South Asia there are already 112 nuclear power reactors in operation, says the London-based nuclear industry club.

Source :https://www.irrawaddy.org