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    <img alt="Pesek" class="author_photo" src="http://cdn.gotraffic.net/v/20110315_145536/images/authors/pesek.jpg" /><p class="author_caption">William Pesek</p>
        
        

    

 
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              <p>Here's a word for <a href="http://www.bi.go.id" title="Open Web Site" rel="external">Indonesia</a> as it
mulls a nuclear future: Don’t! </p>
<p>Yes, that’s easy for me to say. The fourth most-populous
nation is a shoo-in to join <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/brazil/">Brazil</a>, <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/russia/">Russia</a>, India and <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/china/">China</a> soon
as a BRIC economy. BRIICs, anyone? To keep growing at about 7
percent, Indonesia needs energy, and lots of it. Hence the plan
to build nuclear <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/power-plants/">power plants</a>. </p>
<p>That was before Japan’s March 11 earthquake and nuclear
accident, which ranks alongside Three-Mile Island as among the
world’s worst. If a country as developed, technologically
advanced and earthquake-ready as Japan must scramble to avert a
nuclear catastrophe, what hope do developing nations have? </p>
<p>No disrespect is meant. No one needs to convince me of
Indonesia’s promise or how impressively far it’s come since the
dark days of the 1997-1998 Asian crisis. Yet Indonesia’s
regulatory environment is poor and its public sector far less
tech-savvy than <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/japan/">Japan</a>’s; its disaster-response record needs work
and it’s a very seismically active place. </p>
<p>Indonesia’s nuclear-reactor plans may have been thinkable
BF (before Fukushima). In an AF (after Fukushima) world, they’re
lunacy. If the ongoing drama in Japan tells the world anything,
it’s that earthquake-prone nations should be aggressively
pursuing non-nuclear options to fuel growth. </p>
<h2>Japan’s Drama </h2>
<p>Granted, Japan’s drama is unique. At 40, the Fukushima Dai-
Ichi power plant is almost as old as the median age of Japan’s
126 million people. The technology going into today’s reactors
makes them far safer. The role of age in Japan’s crisis prompted
some world leaders, like <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/germany/">Germany</a>’s <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/chancellor-angela-merkel/">Chancellor Angela Merkel</a>, to
shut their oldest reactors. </p>
<p>The crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s crippled plant is
arguably more a product of the tsunami than the quake (at least
Indonesia plans to locate reactors far enough above <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/sea-level/">sea level</a> to
be safe from such surges). Still, Japan’s disaster has been
decades in the making thanks to falsified safety reports,
underestimated risks and plain old corruption. </p>
<p>Incestuous ties between government and industry helped fuel
the excesses behind the 1980s bubble economy. That same public-
private collusion also plagued responses to the economic
downturn that followed. A bad-loan crisis festered, deflation
took root and competition from China exploded. All the while,
Japan Inc. circled the wagons and tried to stave off both change
and tough decisions. </p>
<h2>Conflicts of Interest </h2>
<p>If ever there were a microcosm of what ails Japan, its
nuclear power industry and a legacy of fatal accidents and
conflicts of interest provide it. Too often, those writing
nuclear-safety rules were also doing surveys and signing off on
inspections. Here’s an issue well worth the attention of Julian
Assange at WikiLeaks. </p>
<p>Were Japan’s nuclear sites better inspected and maintained,
we’d all be better off. </p>
<p>None more so than the technicians battling in Fukushima. We
in Japan are humbled and moved by their courage and dedication
in trying to prevent <a href="http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.oprconst.htm" title="Open Web Site" rel="external">radiation</a> from billowing into our skies. We
watch their fight against the clock with the nagging thought
that none of this should have happened. Nor should the world let
it happen again. </p>
<p>Japan demonstrates the difficult balancing act world
leaders face. With minimal energy reserves of its own, nuclear
power became a <a href="http://www.nisa.meti.go.jp/english/" title="Open Web Site" rel="external">national priority</a> as Japan clawed out of the
devastation of World War II, a conflict it fought partly to
secure oil supplies. Japan has 54 operating nuclear reactors --
more than any country except the U.S. and <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/france/">France</a> -- to power its
industries. This pits economic demands against safety concerns
in one of the world’s most earthquake-prone places. </p>
<h2>Obvious Allure </h2>
<p>For developing nations like Indonesia, the allure of
nuclear power is obvious. Here’s a number that worries me: 110.
That’s Indonesia’s ranking in <a href="http://transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2009/cpi_2009_table" title="Open Web Site" rel="external">Transparency International</a>’s
latest corruption perception index. That’s lower than Senegal
and <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/kazakhstan/">Kazakhstan</a>, and far behind <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/india/">India</a> and <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/thailand/">Thailand</a>. </p>
<p>Unless engineers can build nuclear reactors out of rubber
or elevate them on huge shock absorbers, they’ve got no business
locating them atop the Ring of Fire, that arc of fault lines and
volcanoes encircling the Pacific Basin. And that’s before we
consider the risks associated with corruption. </p>
<p>Japan’s crisis, even in a worst-case scenario, isn’t a
second Chernobyl. That’s easy to forget given the global media’s
over-the-top coverage during the past week. </p>
<h2>Human Factor </h2>
<p>One lesson we should remember from events in modern-day
Ukraine in 1986 was the role of everything from design flaws to
shoddy construction materials to insufficient training of
reactor personnel. In other words, the human factor. </p>
<p>At Fukushima, back-up diesel generators that might’ve
averted the disaster were located in a basement and swamped by
waves. “This in the country that invented the word Tsunami,”
noted Ken Brockman, a former director of nuclear installation
safety at the IAEA in Vienna. </p>
<p>If these things can go this awry in Japan, as efficient,
tech-savvy and work-ethic oriented a nation as there is, where
won’t they? It’s a question <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/indonesia/">Indonesia</a> and other economic
upstarts should consider long and hard. </p>
<p>(William Pesek is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions
expressed are his own.) </p>
<p>To contact the writer of this column:
William Pesek in Tokyo at 
<a href="mailto:wpesek@bloomberg.net" title="Send E-mail">wpesek@bloomberg.net</a> </p>
<p>To contact the editor responsible for this column:
James Greiff at  <a href="mailto:jgreiff@bloomberg.net" title="Send E-mail">jgreiff@bloomberg.net</a> </p>
                    
          
        </div></div><p><strong>Read more:</strong> <a class="rssreadon" rel="external" title="Hey Steve Jobs, a Few Survival Apps for Japan: William Pesek" href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-19/hey-steve-jobs-a-few-survival-apps-for-japan-commentary-by-william-pesek.html" target="_blank">http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-19/hey-steve-jobs-a-few-survival-apps-for-japan-commentary-by-william-pesek.html</a></p>