Indonesia sets a date for its first nuclear plant. The question is earthquakes

Indonesia has talked about nuclear power since the mid-1990s, under Suharto, and never built anything. Now there is a date and a place. The South China Morning Post, carrying a report by the Japanese agency Kyodo News, says the government wants a first plant working by 2032 at the earliest. The leading candidate site is Semesak Island, uninhabited and chosen because it does not sit in an active seismic zone, meaning an area where earthquakes happen often.

What sits behind that first plant is much bigger. Officials want nuclear to supply 12.1 percent of the country's primary energy by 2060. Primary energy means all the energy the country burns or uses, not only electricity. The capacity target is 35 to 42 gigawatts, and since one large power station is roughly a gigawatt, that describes a fleet of reactors rather than a single site. The policy turn is recent. After Fukushima, Indonesia's 2014 energy plan called nuclear a "last option"; in 2025 it became a "strategic choice." Deputy Minister Yuliot told an international nuclear forum last December that policy now explicitly requires nuclear to balance the energy mix and hit decarbonisation targets, decarbonisation being the work of cutting the carbon dioxide that heats the planet.

The objection is the ground itself. Indonesia sits where tectonic plates grind together, which is why a magnitude 7.7 quake killed dozens of people in East Nusa Tenggara earlier this month. Experts and ordinary people quoted in the report keep returning to Fukushima, where a 2011 earthquake and tsunami wrecked a Japanese plant. The counter-argument is coal, which still supplies most of Indonesia's power and which no amount of solar has yet replaced at night.

Why it matters

Anyone who pays an electricity bill has money in this, because reactors are paid for over decades and the cost lands in tariffs and in state debt long before the first watt arrives. The safety question is not really the island, it is the regulator: watch whether Indonesia builds a nuclear safety body that can actually halt a project, and who ends up owning and running the plants. If you live near a shortlisted site, the moment to ask about evacuation plans and land rights is now, not in 2032.