Light at the end of the Tunnel ?

As crisis goes, the inability of Indonesia's PLN to supply sufficient electricity, is not as life-threating as , say, the financial meltdown in the late 1990s. Put it simply, the probability of this "Power Crisis" to follow THAT meltdown into standard Economics textbooks are rather low. Nevertheless, hardly a day goes by this week without the front pages screaming one powerful headline after another.

Faisal Basri, a respected Economist, noted that the problem has been identified for some period of time. It is therefore a bit of a mystery why has this issue seen the light of day only in the last week or so.

Mysterious as it is, the problem is quite serious. Every other day, a small section on the respected Kompas daily carried a list of areas which will experience black outs. Both household and industrial customers are affected by the scheduled black outs. The area where your correspondent lives was supposed to have the pleasure of black out experience today, Monday July 14th. Through a stroke of good luck or otherwise, no black out has occured. Such is the nature of the crisis that while visiting an advisor who is ill in Singapore, the president arranged a meeting with an unnamed group of nine Singapore-based businessmen, that his administration is on the case.

In this newspaper's opinion, there is one additional solution that the country must consider. I am of course refering to Nuclear Power.

If Nuclear Power were a brand name, its reputation is quite radioactive. What with Chernobyl and the Three Mile Island "incidents" entering the folklore, it is understandable why governments around the world aren't automatically warming about it. And yet the facts speak for themselves. The current Nuclear power plants are state-of-the art and have received a lot of improvements. France is oft quoted as a shining example where nuclear works: its citizens enjoy one of the lowest electricity bills in the world, and its air is not mixed with CO2.

Of course there are drawbacks. Cost of building a nuclear plant is not exactly cheap. Then there is the age-old question of where to store the waste fuel.

Against these negatives is the ace card. Unlike power plants running on fossil fuels , whose supply as we know are located in suspect governments, nuclear runs on plutonium. Australia , which arguably is more stable than, say, Russia or Kazakhstan, control among the world's largest deposit of plutonium. Supply to Indonesia. This newspaper contends that the government should look into Nuclear, along with Biofuels, Wind and other alternative form of energy.