What A Waste


Yep, we could be anything if we put our minds to it, but where are the minds, eh?

SBY's new government ministers seem intent in publicising their programmes, probably because they've been told by him to do something in the first 100 days. There may be long-term plans but what we are getting are short-term palliatives. It might be apt to suggest that our newly co-opted leaders are having visions; they are now, after all, inmates "in a long-term institution", one which is a continuation of the Suharto era.

Like Ozymandias, they are happier planning mega projects, monuments to themselves, than dealing with the nitty-gritty details of daily life.

This is presumably why State Research and Technology Minister Suharna Surapranata has announced that because there are power cuts, Indonesia is going ahead with the construction of a nuclear power station.

Rejections of the plan to build the nuclear plant have come not only from people living around Muria Peninsula, but also from others. Concerns have been raised over Indonesia's ability to operate a nuclear power station; the site's vulnerability to earthquakes; and possible leakage.

Nuclear Energy Regulatory Agency (Bapeten) head As Natio Lasman, however, said that the National Atomic Energy Agency (Batan), who are expected to run the power plant once it opens in 2016, had gained experience in running its nuclear research reactor, which had won praise from international nuclear experts.

On fears of a repeat of the Chernobyl disaster, Natio said nuclear technology had advanced and guaranteed better safety and security.

Yes, nuclear technology has advanced so much that in Britain , plans to replace old atomic and coal plants have been put on hold because the main safety regulator, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has said it could not recommend plans for new reactors because of wide-ranging concerns about their safety.

The HSE has to approve the safety of the designs before they can be built. "We have identified a significant number of issues with the safety features of the design that would first have to be progressed. If these are not progressed satisfactorily then we would not issue a design acceptance confirmation," the agency concluded following a study of the latest French EPR and US AP1000 reactor designs.

Kevin Allars, director of new build at the HSE, admitted frustration that the design assessment process was already behind schedule owing to insufficient information from the companies promoting the reactors and a lack of enough trained staff in his own directorate.

If France, the USA and the UK can't get their nuclear energy programmes together, what chance Indonesia, eh?

And, as I have consistently argued, my implacable opposition to the nuclear power industry is that not one country, let alone Indonesia, has satisfactorily resolved the matter of securing the radioactive waste for at least 100,000 years. Perhaps it doesn't really matter, though, because the way the human race is committing collective suicide we must hope that Mother Nature will cope, if only for the cockroaches which will remain in 102,009 AD.

Cockroaches do like waste, and the Jakarta administration is to be applauded for encouraging them.

Explaining why not all Jakarta's rubbish doesn't get collected and dumped, head of the Jakarta Sanitation Agency Eko Bharuna said the city’s rivers were getting narrower and shallower due to frequent littering.

Eko (Echo?) also said that many city residents threw their garbage in the river because of poor trash management.

“In every subdistrict, there should be transit points in which local garbage men store their garbage before it is transported by my agency’s garbage trucks. He admitted that such problems might have occurred as his agency had a shortage of garbage trucks.

“We only have 841 garbage trucks and 40 percent of them have been operating for more than 14 years.

Meanwhile, as Jakarta continues to sink below ever encroaching floods, the administration is going ahead with plans to build elevated toll roads through the city.

Presumably these capital intensive monuments to grandiose incompetence will be very popular with tourists who, like me, will continue to look down, admire the accumulated garbage, yawn and withdraw.

 

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¶ 7:00 am