Nuclear option: Indonesia seeks to grow energy, cut emissions

Its first experiment with nuclear energy dates to February 1965, when then-president Sukarno inaugurated a test reactor. Sixty years later, Southeast Asia's largest economy has three research reactors but no nuclear power plants for electricity. Abundant reserves of polluting coal have so far met the enormous archipelago's energy needs. But "nuclear will be necessary to constrain the rise of and eventually reduce emissions", said Philip Andrews-Speed, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.