DR Mahathir Mohamad says Malaysia would never use nuclear power as a way of generating electricity as long as he is the prime minister, after the previous government had entertained the possibility.

“Although science has advanced, it has not been able to deal with the waste material after it ceases to be the source of power,” he said at the Conference of the Electric Power Supply Industry (CEPSI) 2018 in Kuala Lumpur today.

“Just imagine with a nuclear power plant, there will come a stage where you have to get rid of the waste. If you have a huge number you will need huge resources to handle it.

“So because of that, that was the policy when I was the fourth PM. That was not the policy of the 5th and 6th prime ministers but now I have come back.

“It may be cheap to generate electricity from nuclear material but we are not going to do that simply because we are not sure we can get rid of the waste,” he said.

Present were Energy, Technology, Science, Climate Change and Environment Minister Yeo Bee Yin and Tenaga Nasional Bhd chairman Leo Moggie.

Earlier Dr Mahathir said that Malaysia is “quite fortunate” to have three main sources of generating electricity, namely oil, coal and hydro-electric power.

“Many people wanted to have nuclear power plants in Malaysia after I stepped down, because when I am still around, there are two things people do. Number 1, they don’t smoke near me, and Number 2, they don’t generate electricity with nuclear power.”

Dr Mahathir spoke of his first administration’s “bad experience” with amang, or tin tailing, a waste material which produced radiation.

He said activated amang was once used in the manufacture of colour television sets.

“Later on, people found other ways (to manufacture televisions), but the amang has already been activated, and we have been left with the residue and because of that people cannot go near the amang because of the radiation.”

He said a company, which he did not name, had agreed to bury the waste material under thick cement.

“So we lost one square kilometre of land because it is still not safe to be there. What we learnt from that is that the waste from radioactive material is not easy to dispose of.

“If we want to dispose of it, we cannot find a place, we need to bury it deep in the ground. We have to throw it somewhere. if you put it in the sea, then the fish will suffer and we cannot eat the fish. And, where can we put the waste? That is the question.

“It may be cheap to generate electricity from nuclear material but we are not going to do that simply because we are not sure we can get rid of the waste.

“The other thing is like you see in Japan, when there’s an earthquake, power plants can get into trouble and whole areas are no longer habitable.

“Lots of money has been spent to stop the radiation and people cannot go back because of the radiation,” he said, also citing the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 as another example.

“Of course, if you have a nuclear war, then you can be sure the whole world will be irradiated as the radiation will be carried by the jetstream.

“I still believe we do not know enough about nuclear power to make use of it, whether in peace or in war.”

Dr Mahathir concluded that Malaysia still contains “quite a lot of coal” that is not utilised and said country could export it, adding there is enough coal in Batu Arang, Selangor, and in Sabah and Sarawak.

“So, we feel we are able to supply enough electricity for a long, long time.”

He also encouraged industry players to commit to renewable energy sources, saying the government would support such initiatives.

Under the Najib Razak administration, a Nuclear Power Development Steering Committee was established in June 2009, to co-ordinate efforts towards deploying nuclear energy for electricity generation. The committee had initially set 2021 as the target year.

In 2016, the Prime Minister’s Department put off the nuclear programme to after 2030 due to negative sentiment following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011.

Coal currently makes up half of all fuel used to generate electricity in Malaysia.

Yeo has said that Putrajaya is committed to diversifying the country’s electricity generation from coal and gas to renewables and increase renewables from 2% of the fuel mix to 20% by 2025.

The biennial Conference of the Electric Power Supply Industry, co-organised by TNB, is the largest energy and electricity supply industry conference in Malaysia, attended by 2,000 delegates from some 30 countries.

Themed ‘Reimagining Utility of the Future’, the conference, set to end on Thursday, will see around 550 technical papers and five keynote sessions delivered, with over 100 exhibitors participating. – September 18, 2018.