Recommendations for Political Education to the Nuclear Engineering Students

On October 17th, 2014, Peraturan Pemerintah Republik Indonesia Nomor 79 Tahun 2014 about National Energy Policy (NEP) was released. In the article 11 subsection 3 states that the utilization of nuclear energy is placed as the last option due to several reasons; such as safety standard, high level security, and its radiation hazardous effect. NEP was formulated by the National Energy Council (NEC), whose functions comprise of designing and formulating NEP; adopting national energy planning; designing steps to overcome energy crisis; and monitoring the implementation of energy policy. NEP determines the national energy planning and regional energy planning. Based on the legal strength of the NEP and the fact that nuclear energy is the last option; in order to prevent the nuclear energy will be the last option for the next NEP, the involvement of nuclear experts in the formulation of NEP is recommended. The recommendation for nuclear experts’ involvement in the future is supported by the survey result from the nuclear engineering students, who are the future nuclear experts. The result shows that 64.2% from the 67 respondents are interested in the Indonesia energy policy. In addition, 65.7% from the 67 respondents are interested in proposing nuclear power plant through politics. Furthermore, Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics of Universitas Gadjah Mada had already provided optional political course entitled Nuclear Regulation and SSAC, but was not open due to limited number of interested students. Thus, this paper gives recommendation to overcome those problems, which may hopefully sustain and enhance nuclear engineering students’ political enthusiasm to guide them in participating the formulation of the next NEP in the future.