Does Malaysia really need nuclear power plants?

In the wake of the mega earthquake and monstrous tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan on March 11 2011, it also caused a nuclear fallout to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The successive days following the earthquake and tsunami saw four out of the six nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi exploded and leaked out radioactive substances into the surrounding environment, prompting the Japanese government to issue advisory for affected residents to evacuate far away from the crippled nuclear power plant. And the Japanese authorities are racing against time to contain the nuclear contamination to the most minimum possible levels. No matter how efficient the Japanese authorities are, the radioactive contamination became a tremendous challenge and a national crisis.

Which brings me to the point - does Malaysia really need nuclear power plants for future power generation? From a layman's point of view, I would think that Malaysia should consider other sources of renewable energy for future power generation. Malaysia is actually blessed with plenty of natural sources of renewable energy, being located in a tropical region. Solar, wind and hydro energies could be utilised to complement the current fossil fuel power plants for power generation. I think that the utilisation of nuclear power plants should only be as the last resort when there are no more viable options for power generation.

In my humble opinion, renewable energy should be the way to go when seeking for alternatives to fossil fuel power generation. It is also because we need to ensure that the environment is taken into consideration in this matter. Using nuclear power plants means that there would radioactive waste to be managed. Radioactive waste could take aeons to bio-degrade and thus, would definitely affect many future generations of living things on the Earth.

Even developed countries that have vast experience in operating nuclear power plants face serious issues in managing them well, with Japan's current nuclear crisis as an excellent example. There were other serious nuclear crises, the notable one being in Chernobyl, Ukraine on April 26 1986. These nuclear accidents statistics could be found in International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports.


As Malaysia is a small country, a nuclear crisis is an unimaginable nightmare if it does happen. The possibility of the whole country and even the ASEAN region being completely wiped out because of a nuclear crisis is really unthinkable. As a very concerned citizen of Malaysia I sincerely hope this does not happen if nuclear power plants are to be utilised for power generation in the future. The least we can do for Mother Nature is to give all the care we can to conserve and preserve it for the future generations of all living things, and not destroy to it.