Indonesian clerics say nuclear plant forbidden

[nabraxas]

JAKARTA (Reuters) - A group of Indonesian Muslim clerics have declared that a nuclear power plant due to be built in Central Java is religiously forbidden because its danger outweighs potential benefits, a scholar said on Monday.

Asia-Pacific's only OPEC member has been trying to promote the use of alternative energy in an effort to reduce its reliance on oil and cut energy costs, and plans to build the nuclear power plant on the Muria Peninsula in Central Java.

But the plan has proved controversial, particularly given the predominantly Muslim nation suffers frequent earthquakes.

Muslim scholars from the local branch of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the country's largest Islamic group, met in the Central Java district of Jepara at the weekend to discuss the issue.

They agreed that the plant would endanger the lives of people in the area and was therefore forbidden under Islam, said Ahmad Rozikin, one of the scholars.

"We concluded that its downsides outweigh potential benefits from the plant. It threatens the survival of human beings in the area," Rozikin told Reuters.

NU Secretary General Syaiful Bahri said the fatwa was reached at district level and that the issue remained controversial.

"There are still disagreements, even among those who attended the meeting," he said.

The proposed plant would have a capacity to produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity to help meet rising demand from the country's 220 million people and is likely to cost $1.5 billion.

State electricity company PT Perusahaan Listrik Negara plans to build power plants to generate 10,000 megawatts by 2010 to meet rising demand and avoid power shortages.

The chief of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, has said Indonesia should not face any problem in its plan to develop civilian nuclear energy because it had met its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

But environmental group Greenpeace said in July that building a nuclear power plant in such a seismically active country would be a mistake.

http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/id...03?pageNumber=2

[Auxin]

Nice to see rational morality coming from an arbahamic religion. The question is will their morality endure the bribes they will soon be offered.

I live next to a radioactive wasteland thats a testament to what happens when westerners have to choose between morality and money.

[El Barto]

nuclear power doesnt seem all bad to me

yea a bit of waste and the bombs

but its still cleaner that coal

but yea i say solar would be the way to go

mabie make roads out of solar panels

or roof tiles made frrom solar panals that interlock and make a circuit so you can use as many or as little as you like

Edited September 6, 2007 by El Barto

[chilli]

Auxin, I thought the money was in coal power? As far as I have been able to tell, nuclear power is the lesser of two evils.

[Auxin]

theres money in everything. Nuclear "energy" is a vast storehouse of money, and not as oil-free as TV says. It takes tremendous oil to mine and transport uranium ore, it takes lots of oil to refine it to uranium metal, more oil to refine that into DU and EU uranium, the DU is formed into illegal radiological/toxicological (its strongly nephrotoxic in addition to the radiation damage) weapons to be used against civilian population centers in the middle east- thats $$$!!! and politically excusable genocide, then the power station gets its EU and it takes a great fountain of oil to sustain the machines and security equiptment, then theres massive national and multinational bodies to regulate, manipulate, and argue over nuclear matters, then world bodies regulate who can use nuclear energy making nuclear countries able to sell energy from their grid to non-nuclear grids, then its regulated who can enrich uranium so some nuclear countires must buy from other places- that adds more layers of cash, politics, etc., and of course there are constant spills and so tremendous money goes into studying them, cataloging them, trying to clean them, failing to clean them, trying to clean the failed cleaning attempts, hollowing out volcanoes to pour the waste into once an entire railroad is built to transport it half the way across a continent... and those are just the most obvious factors involved! Its a horrible money and political mess that hurts innocent people at every step.

Dont get me wrong, burning coal sucks too. But at least we could reverse most damage done by coal burning.

Oh and I nearly forgot: Siding with the "lesser of two evils" is siding with evil.

Edited September 6, 2007 by Auxin

[chilli]

theres money in everything. Nuclear "energy" is a vast storehouse of money, and not as oil-free as TV says. It takes tremendous oil to mine and transport uranium ore, it takes lots of oil to refine it to uranium metal, more oil to refine that into DU and EU uranium, the DU is formed into illegal radiological/toxicological (its strongly nephrotoxic in addition to the radiation damage) weapons to be used against civilian population centers in the middle east- thats $$$!!! and politically excusable genocide, then the power station gets its EU and it takes a great fountain of oil to sustain the machines and security equiptment, then theres massive national and multinational bodies to regulate, manipulate, and argue over nuclear matters, then world bodies regulate who can use nuclear energy making nuclear countries able to sell energy from their grid to non-nuclear grids, then its regulated who can enrich uranium so some nuclear countires must buy from other places- that adds more layers of cash, politics, etc., and of course there are constant spills and so tremendous money goes into studying them, cataloging them, trying to clean them, failing to clean them, trying to clean the failed cleaning attempts, hollowing out volcanoes to pour the waste into once an entire railroad is built to transport it half the way across a continent... and those are just the most obvious factors involved! Its a horrible money and political mess that hurts innocent people at every step.

Dont get me wrong, burning coal sucks too. But at least we could reverse most damage done by coal burning.

Oh and I nearly forgot: Siding with the "lesser of two evils" is siding with evil.

Good points, I must admit to not being very knowledgeable about any of that... I am not siding with 'evil' though Bush, it is just a figure of speech.

[nabraxas]

It takes a lot of fossil energy to mine uranium, and then to extract and prepare the right isotope for use in a nuclear reactor. It takes even more fossil energy to build the reactor, and, when its life is over, to decommission it and look after its radioactive waste.

As a result, with current technology, there is only a limited amount of uranium ore in the world that is rich enough to allow more energy to be produced by the whole nuclear process than the process itself consumes. This amount of ore might be enough to supply the world's total current electricity demand for about six years.

Moreover, because of the amount of fossil fuel and fluorine used in the enrichment process, significant quantities of greenhouse gases are released. As a result, nuclear energy is by no means a 'climate-friendly' technology.

more good info on the unsustainability(?) ov nuclear power here