Any decision on whether or not to have nuclear energy in Singapore is a long way away, the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) reiterated yesterday.
Responding to requests from The Straits Times for an update on the nuclear option, MTI said that Singapore is in the midst of a ‘pre-feasibility study on nuclear energy’.
It said safety is a very important consideration, and is one of the key areas being studied.
‘It will be a long time before we make any decision on nuclear energy. We are closely monitoring and learning from the developments in Japan,’ it added in a statement.
At an energy conference in November last year, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had identified nuclear power as an ‘important part of the solution to mankind’s energy problems’.
He said Singapore was building up its capabilities now because the nuclear option is one it ‘cannot afford to dismiss’.
Measures taken will include getting in touch with nuclear experts as well as training local engineers and scientists.
He said then that MTI was doing a pre-feasibility study on having nuclear power here, but it will be a long time before any decision is made.
Those in the nuclear and energy fields contacted said that events in Japan were unlikely to derail the pre-feasibility study.
Assistant Professor T.S. Gopi Rethinaraj of the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy said: ‘What happened in Japan is an act of God and highly unlikely to happen in Singapore as it does not sit on any fault lines and will be insulated from any earthquakes or tsunamis.’
He holds a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Agreeing, Dr Hooman Peimani, who heads the energy security division at NUS’ Energy Studies Institute, pointed out that there had been only two other major nuclear plant accidents over the last 60 years.
They were the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania in the United States, and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine.
He said that aside from natural calamities, terrorist threats and saboteurs, there were no ‘worst-case scenarios’ that might hamper Singapore’s nuclear capabilities.
‘Even so, Singapore’s oil refineries have already been so well guarded over the past 30 years, I don’t think defence or security will be an issue,’ said Dr Peimani, who presented a paper on the viability of underground nuclear reactors in Singapore at the Nuclear Power conference last year.
Mr Ravi Krishnaswamy, vice-president of consultancy Frost & Sullivan’s Asia-Pacific energy and power systems practice, said that the decision to build nuclear reactors will take years.
During pre-feasibility studies, the authorities will, among other things, assess if nuclear energy is feasible and look at its implications on health, he said.
