An Asian Chernobyl?

In the nightmare scenario painted by Australian writer Kerry B. Collison, Indonesia is stricken by a meltdown at one of its nuclear reactors. The deadly radioactive fallout spreads quickly, devastating the archipelago and other parts of the region.

A former Indonesia-based diplomat and businessman, Collison wrote Jakarta as a work of fiction, but events in the novel closely resemble the projections of a 1994 study carried out by the Australian National University. The university's research indicated that a release of radioactive gas could spread within days from Java to other parts of Southeast Asia and Australia, leaving a trail of environmental destruction and widespread loss of human life.

That study is today being revised as Indonesia comes close to deciding whether it will restart its stalled nuclear programme.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono issued a decree in January last year calling for a nuclear-powered electricity industry by 2016. A decision on its feasibility is being debated in Jakarta and a decision is due by the end of the year. If approved, the programme would involve building a 1,000MW reactor on northern Java's Muria peninsula, at the foot of a 1,600-metre volcano. The peninsula is a picturesque landscape of paddy fields and rubber plantations. The site is the same as the one chosen for the country's original nuclear project, supported by former dictator Suharto but shelved after 1997's Asian financial crisis.

A government blueprint also shows proposed plans for three more nuclear plants to generate 6 gigawatts of power by 2025. A total of US$8 billion has reportedly been earmarked for the scheme.

Indonesian environmental group Forum for Environment (Walhi) said a nuclear reactor would be nothing less than a time bomb, with a small accident at the site potentially affecting tens of millions of people and dwarfing the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union.

At the time of that catastrophe, the town of Chernobyl had about 14,000 inhabitants. The radioactive clouds that drifted over Ukraine, Belarus and Russia resulted in more than 336,000 people being relocated and radioactive poisoning in the area persists to this day.