(DOWNLOAD) "Southeast Asia's Nuclear Power Thrust: Putting Asean's Effectiveness to the Test?(Report)" by Contemporary Southeast Asia * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Southeast Asia's Nuclear Power Thrust: Putting Asean's Effectiveness to the Test?(Report)
- Author : Contemporary Southeast Asia
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 297 KB
Description
Nuclear power suddenly has come into favour among governments in Southeast Asia as a means of helping solve looming electricity shortages. While just three or four years ago nuclear energy did not feature in the medium- and long-term power development master plans of countries in the region, now Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand have plans for nuclear power generation while Malaysia and the Philippines are studying the option. As yet, there are no commercial nuclear power plants in operation in the region, though there are small research reactors. However, as in other parts of the world, both where there are established nuclear generation industries as in Europe, North America and Northeast Asia and also in regions and countries where there are not, such as in the Middle East, nuclear power's fortunes are on the rise. Nuclear is being turned to as a possible solution to the problem of meeting electricity demand at a time when the cost of the traditional fossil fuels used for power generation, essentially coal and natural gas, are rising steeply, and in ways that mitigate against the large contribution to the greenhouse effect and predicted global warming by the combustion of fossil fuels and their production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But plans and possibilities in Southeast Asia raise a gamut of economic, environmental and security issues and fears. Policymakers have only begun to grapple with these concerns. How, and to what extent, governments in the region go about implementing nuclear power programmes is still far from clear, though first plants are planned to come into operation towards the end of the next decade. This may, in fact, be an ambitious timetable even though the pressures to meet electricity demand are large and growing.