Hacker News Reader

Comment by grizzles | Hacker News Reader

This is a political project. It's difficult to consider it otherwise in a rational decision making context.

Any engineer would take one look at this and go yep, let's put a nuclear reactor on one or more of Singapore's 64 surrounding islands.

Singapore could get oodles of solar from Malaysia but they obviously aren't interested in doing that. Since the guys financing it have no qualms about fronting this project obviously Singapore is keen to fund this project as a customer but wants to be seen for some reason as a reluctant buyer.

View on HN

> Singapore could get oodles of solar from Malaysia but they obviously aren't interested in doing that

To anyone who knows the history of Singapore, it is obvious why (and you quite possibly already know all this, but I'm sure many other people reading this don't). Singapore became independent because the Malaysian government wanted to introduce "affirmative action" laws which discriminated against ethnic minorities, especially ethnic Chinese. Singapore was the only state of Malaysia with an ethnic Chinese majority, and was fundamentally opposed to such laws. The Malaysian federal government's response was to expel Singapore from Malaysia and force it to become an independent country, so that it would be free to impose these laws on the rest of Malaysia without Singapore's opposition. And Singapore has never trusted Malaysia since.

And has similarly discriminated against Malays in Singapore to this day! The messy knife of history cuts both ways.

Is that really true? Malaysia has official policies to give preference to the ethnic Malay majority in education, government jobs, business licensing, etc. Singapore's formal policies on those matters are, to the best of my knowledge, ethnically and racially neutral. I'm sure ethnic minorities in Singapore suffer from some degree of informal discrimination (as they do in many other countries), but I don't believe they suffer from anything like the active discrimination as an official policy which the Malaysian government imposes.

There is some governmental discrimination, notably in the military (Malays are effectively excluded from sensitive positions) and granting residency/citizenship (reportedly virtually impossible for ethnic Malays from Malaysia or Indonesia). Both are officially denied though, and yes, these are nowhere near as wide-ranging as Malaysia's policies.

https://coconuts.co/singapore/features/ns50-celebrates-50-ye...

If an ethnic Chinese Singaporean marries a Malaysian Malay, the Singaporean government will cite every rule in the book about income requirements and "suitability".

But if we're talking Malaysian Chinese....

People need to stop worshipping Singapore like they are a fantasy land of perfection. They have specific flaws of their own, plus flaws similar to other countries.

I'm not sure if that is anti-Malay so much as pro-Chinese.

An older friend told a story of a colleague he worked with in Vietnam who got married and tried to move back to Singapore. Multiple attempts to let his wife come along were rejected until he amended the paperwork to say she was Chinese ethnicity.

Might be a tall tale, but that's how it was told to me. I don't know the exact years in question though, it might have been a decade or more ago.

There are no stats published, so this is all anecdotal, but it's generally suspected that they operate on some kind of quota basis. The Chinese quota is large (but no longer infinite, esp for mainland Chinese), the Indian/Other quota is small, and the Malay/Muslim quota is nearly zero.

I certainly don't "worship Singapore" as some "fantasy land of perfection".

Personally, I am still angry at Singapore over the execution of Van Tuong Nguyen.

Malaysia at least is working on trying to abolish the death penalty. Singapore doesn't appear interested in that.

Malaysia is definitely ahead of Singapore in the area of political pluralism (although it is too early to say whether Malaysia's recent improvements in this area are going to endure.)

On the other hand, in the specific area of treatment of ethnic minorities, I still believe Singapore is ahead of Malaysia. The Singaporean government does ethnically discriminate in some areas, but to a far lesser extent than the Malaysian government does

Religious freedom is another area in which I'd say Singapore remains ahead of Malaysia: the Singaporean government imposes some restrictions on non-mainstream religious groups (like Jehovah's Witnesses and Unification Church), but it is officially neutral in religious matters; Malaysia's government does not display anywhere near the same neutrality

The rampant racism in the Singapore public schools, the casual everyday racism and micro-aggressions that Singapore minorities face, local Chinese owned company’s using Mandarin as requirement to exclude minorities, lack of representation in ads/commercials/billboards for minorities, the openly racist statement made by politicians that the majority Chinese will not accept a Singapore Indian as a PM... Singapore has actually regressed when it comes to the Racial relations since the Sixties. This close minded xenophobia will in the long run stymie it’s growth and social stability, if not addressed. You can read some of the stories shared by Singapore minorities on their racist experiences on Insta: @minorityvoices. @lepakconversations

High time that William Gibson does another article on Singapore.

Providing a list of problems that Singapore has with ethnic discrimination – and I don't deny all those problems you've listed are real – doesn't actually answer the comparative question of how Malaysia and Singapore compare in this area.

I think the difference is between a country whose official written policies claim to treat minorities fairly and equally, but which often in practice fails to fully live up to those claims (and Singapore is far from being the only country for which that's true); and a country whose official legislated government policy is to discriminate against ethnic minorities. Can you see how the later is worse than former?

To be honest, Malaysia is probably no better and indeed actually much worse than Singapore in most if noy all areas of comparison. Given the choice between living in either of them, my choice would be neither.

But I suspect that most people prefer Singapore even compared to the rest of the world and I personally think they are falling for the trap personally set for them by the Lee family.

Political pluralism and substantive democracy are definitely one area in which Malaysia appears to have been doing better than Singapore recently, although it remains to be seen whether those developments in Malaysia become permanent or whether it goes back to the old system. This year’s political crisis has not been a positive sign in that department, but it is probably too soon to evaluate its ultimate significance.

The great thing is that they can both point to each other as an example of what would happen if the wrong group of people get in power.

While it is true that Malaysia runs an apartheid regime that favours the Malay race (meaning a body of laws that codify preference for civil service jobs, grants, land ownership, certain licenses, language of instruction in school etc etc) as a means to secure the vote of the majority Malays - those philosophical/political differences aren't the reason why Singapore would prefer to purchase solar power from Australia rather than Malaysia.

Electricity generation in Singapore runs on natural gas which are fed from pipelines to fields in Indonesia and Malaysia. LNG ports were developed to create an international supply chain and a solar cable to Australia would be a similar geostrategic/economic strategy of diversification through multiple vendors.

Malaysia has, at any rate, sowed the harvest of their political strategy. The Malay population has crept upwards as a percentage of total population, as Indians and Chinese with any ability have left for Australia and Singapore as popular destinations. This has secured pro-Malay politics as the only way to win an election in Malaysia, but ironically the increased ground means the old monolith pro-Malay party has splintered to fight for control. Today's Malaysia sees several strong pro-Malay parties jostling for power.

Singapore would prefer nobody build a nuclear reactor anywhere near it. Even if a reactor was located 50km away outside of Singapore, any accident could divert shipping lanes away from the Malacca Strait and disrupt air travel that hubs in Singapore. A nuclear reactor strategy for Singapore is like picking pennies before a bulldozer.

> Any engineer would take one look at this and go yep, let's put a nuclear reactor on one or more of Singapore's 64 surrounding islands.

This was actually a plan years ago[1], but they couldn’t identify an island that they found suitable for building/reclamation and which met the 30km setback requirements for a nuclear plant.

1. https://mothership.sg/2018/08/lee-kuan-yew-nuclear-power-pla...

And given the number of tsunamis in the region and the specific example of Fukushima it's pretty clear why they don't want to compromise on that requirement.

> This is a political project.

I'm sure there's political manoeuvring involved, but are you asserting that this will not be economically advantageous to both parties involved in the trade?

> Any engineer would take one look at this and go yep, let's put a nuclear reactor on one or more of Singapore's 64 surrounding islands.

Some engineers might, but it sounds like a very expensive and high risk proposition.

Hmm, trying to think of some recent accidents that involved nuclear fission power plants built close to sea level.

> Singapore could get oodles of solar from Malaysia but they obviously aren't interested in doing that.

Apart from the political complexities, you may find the air pollution and frequency of storms in that region would significantly impact on the oodle volume.

Parts of far north Australia certainly have a wet season, but I suspect if you compared hours of sunlight per year, it'd be well ahead of Malaysia. Latitude seasonal advantages might also be a consideration.

Nuclear power is the safest form of power delivery.

Fukushima is a good lesson, but nuclear power can clearly be engineered to work safely at sea level and below. The US Navy submarine corps has demonstrated it for decades.

Singapore is a technologically advanced society, they could pull it off if they gave it the attention it deserves.

> Singapore is a technologically advanced society, they could pull it off if they gave it the attention it deserves.

There's no evidence that Singapore has not already considered this idea, and subsequently given it precisely the attention it deserves.

I understand that you think it's a grand idea, but the indisputable fact that many technologically advanced societies are eschewing these things may indicate your evaluation criteria is incomplete.

Until it isn’t, and a single accident means a huge chunk of inhabited land is no longer inhabitable.

How big is the Chernobyl or Fukushima exclusion zone? How big is Singapore?

One accident and the country would be essentially gone.

The Japanese Nuclear Commission had the following goals set in 2003:

> The mean value of acute fatality risk by radiation exposure resultant from an accident of a nuclear installation to individuals of the public, who live in the vicinity of the site boundary of the nuclear installation, should not exceed the probability of about 1×10^6 per year (that is, at least 1 per million years)

Their one in a million-year accident occurred about 8 years later.

You can't trust theoretically derived probabilities, such as those used when discussing the safety of the nuclear field for which the effective track record is only 70 years.

Safest? https://youtu.be/yInNecEQjeg

Indisputably. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

> Indisputably.

I'll give it a go.

From the article you cite:

"Nuclear: there are two key points to differentiate in the estimates of nuclear energy safety. The first is the period which the studies cover. Analysis by Markandya & Wilkinson (2007) predates the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, and therefore does not include this accident in its estimates. This fact, however, does not fully explain why the two studies differ: we might assume the inclusion of the Fukushima disaster would increase death rates but in fact the estimates of Sovacool et al. (2016) are lower.

"The largest differentiator here is the period which the Sovacool et al. (2016) estimates cover. They report normalized death rates over the limited period from 1990 to 2013. This means the 1986 Chernobyl accident was not included. Sovacool et al. (2016) only include deaths from the Fukushima accident, with 573 attributed deaths. It is useful to note here that not all deaths were a direct result of the accident: for Fukushima, there were no direct deaths from the disaster; one confirmed death from radiation exposure; and the rest noted as premature deaths from evacuation and displacement of populations in the surrounding area."

In addition I see that they are considering deaths only, which for both fossil fuels and nuclear fission is going to skew the numbers in their favour compared to renewable.

Not sure what a complete picture would look like - you'd have to put some $-values against health & QoL impacts, and that's assuming you could accurately do root cause on chronic illness back to a power generation.

In any case, nuclear fission is unlikely to make a resurgence, for any number of reasons.

Your own link says (direct quote): "Modern renewables are about as safe as nuclear energy".

And if you read further you see this:

Let’s again put this into the context of our town of 27,000 EU citizens, who would collectively consume around one terawatt-hour of energy a year. These are the impacts if they got all of their energy from a given source:

Coal: 25 people would die prematurely every year;

...

Nuclear: it would take between 14 and 100 years before someone died;

...

Solar: 53 years before someone died.

Also, the costs of nuclear accidents are generally underestimated:

according to our analysis, with 388 reactors in operation, there is a 50% probability of a Fukushima-like event (or more costly) every 60–150 years, and a Three Mile Island event (or more costly) every 10–20 years.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2015.12.026

Also Australia has large amounts of unpopulated flat land. Something that Malaysia doesn’t have.

I had the feeling that there may be reasons not to put a nuclear plant near the equator as you suggest. I had to check but if they were to do this it would be one of the only reactors in the world essentially right on the equator [1]. One of the reasons this might be a bad idea is that many winds and ocean currents are trans-equatorial, so a fall out event would spread radiation across an entire hemisphere. The high levels of water vapour and rain may also cause problems. There is also the frequency of earthquakes, which are high in that region [2].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-15/mapping-n...

[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_earthquakes_1...

While earthquakes are frequent in the broader region, Singapore is very seismically stable and sheltered even from tsunamis. For example, the Boxing Day tsunami had zero impact.

It could also be that most countries on the equator are poorer countries that can't afford the cost of a nuclear power plant. The underdevelopment of tropical countries is a well known phenomenon.

At this point, i would consider any engineer who even considers a nuclear power plant within 200km of an inhabited area to be highly irresponsible.

As a species, we have not demonstrated the ability to create engineering organizations that put safety first in design and operations of Nuclear power plants - even the Japanese with their renowned safety culture couldn't do manage it.

Maybe if and when we get intrinsically safe nuclear power plants that demonstrably cannot irridate their surroundings if things go boom, then I'd reconsider but i don't believe there are any of those operational anywhere currently.

> Singapore could get oodles of solar from Malaysia but they obviously aren't interested in doing that.

And they are not interested in a cable to Indonesia either. Even an overland "transit" from a third country was refused by them.

Its an economic project rather than a political project. A good percentage of Singapore economy is based on oil. Doing this now and getting experience on it would allow them a leg up on the competition for the future where solar will be even cheaper in the future and more countries start seeing this as an option.

What about Indonesia or other South East Asian countries ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com