INDONESIA PLANS TO BUILT NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

Jakarta (ANTARA News) - Indonesia is considering cooperating with a few foreign countries to set up a nuclear reactor on the Muria Peninsula, Central Java, in order to reach its traget of having a 1,000 MW nuclear power plant by 2015, a cabinet minister said.

"We plan to be in possession of a 1,000 Megawatt facility by 2015 as the first stage of a plan to have a 4,000 Megawatt nuclear power capacity. Because implementation of the project will take six years, it means we must start it in 2009. So we should make the necessary preprations within the next two years," Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Purnomo Yusgiantoro said here Monday.

"At the moment we are still considering four foreign countries to cooperate with, namely France, Japan, South Korea, and the US," he said.

According to Purnomo, since several years ago the government has placed some monitoring instruments in the Muria Peninsula to evaluate whether it was safe to use the area as the location of a nuclear power plant.

"Apperently, up to now the conclusion obtained from the monitoring instruments are showing that the area is stable enough for a nuclear power plant," he said.

Purnomo said Indonesia actually already had a reactor producing about 30 Megawatt in Serpong, West Java.

"And, it is using BWR (Boiling Water Reactor) technology So, our human resources and experts are already familiar with BWR technology. Most possibly we will also use BWR technology (in the Muria project) but maybe of a more sophisticated kind ," he said.(*)