Floating reactors, foreign owners and some unanswered questions
4 November 2026
Indonesia's plans to bring in Russian floating nuclear reactors could help meet its growing energy needs, but they also raise questions about safety, foreign control and regional security. Asia Media Centre's Graeme Acton looks at what's at stake for Indonesia, its neighbours and New Zealand.
On paper, it’s a neat solution. Indonesia is a sprawling archipelago of thousands of islands, many of them hard to wire into a grid. Russia’s Rosatom is offering a power station that arrives by sea. Rosatom says it signed an agreement during Russian Energy Week in Moscow to supply power to northern Halmahera in North Maluku, using two floating units with a combined 200 megawatts. It describes the deal as the first export agreement of its kind anywhere.
The region hosts the huge Weda Bay nickel operation and the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park, home to some heavy Chinese investment. There’s also long-running gold mining around Kao in the north. Nickel processing is power-hungry, and much of that power comes currently comes from coal plants.
For a country trying to cut emissions, a low-carbon source of electricity is attractive, and nobody disputes that. But the more you look at how this deal is built, the more complex it seems.
Who’s really in charge?
The structure is unusual. Rosatom keeps ownership of the floating units, and the contract covers buying their electricity across a 60-year period. Indonesia is essentially renting a reactor from a foreign state corporation and signing up to a very long relationship.
Rosatom doesn’t hide the bigger ambition either. It has proposed a two-phase path for Indonesia, with small floating units first and large land-based plants afterwards. Halmahera could end up as the Russian foot in the door rather than a one-off.
Analysts note that relying on Rosatom for nuclear fuel and waste handling builds a long-term dependency that is hard to unwind. In practice, Jakarta could find itself tied to Moscow’s fortunes for most of this century, in an increasingly unstable world.
The sanctions problem
Russia’s relations with the West are hardly normalised. Indonesia hasn’t joined Western sanctions on Moscow, which fits its long non-aligned tradition. But Rosatom itself has been a target. The company has previously been sanctioned by the United States, and President Trump signed the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 in September, placing sanction and visa restrictions on Rosatom’s senior leaders, board members and controlling shareholders.
The law allows presidential exemptions on national security grounds, and some critics suggest the measures were watered down and will do little to curb Rosatom’s overseas business, including I a nation like Indonesia, and Asian that Washington badly wants onside.
What could go wrong?
The regulators have pointed to more than one worst case scenario, always a useful process when it comes to nuclear power.
The first is the ordinary physical risk. Indonesia sits on the Pacific’s volatile seismic belt, has no commercial nuclear experience, and would be licensing a floating reactor type that has barely been tested. Rosatom does run one floating plant, the Akademik Lomonosov, and has done so for more than five years.
That ship is in Pevek, a small port town in Chukotka, in Russia’s far northeast on the Arctic coast, roughly across the Bering Strait from Alaska, and a seven hour flight from the regional capital Vladivostok.
Rosatom says the units have been adapted for warm waters, but the company has published little about what that actually involves, and the design proposed for Indonesia has never operated in tropical seas
The second issue is who responds if something goes wrong. A reactor moored off a remote Maluku coast is a long way from specialist help. Indonesia would have to radically upskill its nuclear oversight and response regime to be credible.
The third is conflict. Floating power plants are mobile, which is part of their appeal and also their problem. A foreign-owned reactor in contested waters, in a region where great-power rivalry is intensifying, is a different proposition from one parked in a remote Arctic port. Maluku has been one of the most unstable parts of Indonesia in the past and Ukraine has already shown the world what happens when a nuclear plant ends up near a battlefield.
The region is watching
Nuclear safety doesn’t stop at maritime borders, and the neighbours know it. Reporting in Malaysia noted that the reactors would be about 3,000km from Kuala Lumpur, with Rosatom promoting a replica of its floating plant at a trade show in the Malaysian capital just as the deal was announced. Observers have suggested that Australia and Singapore have expressed scepticism, and that Jakarta could ease those worries by inviting IAEA inspections openly.
Further south and east, New Zealand and the South Pacific have long memories. The region fought for decades to get rid of nuclear testing, and anything involving radioactive material at sea gets a largely negative reception. Pacific governments and the Pacific Islands Forum haven’t yet had much to say publicly about Halmahera, but they will.
The window is now
The agreement with Indonesia is preliminary, and Rosatom says power could flow within five years, but that timeline will only start once the key supply arrangements take effect.
Who carries liability in an accident? Who regulates a foreign-owned reactor in Indonesian waters? What happens to the fuel afterwards? And will neighbours, including New Zealand, get real transparency ?
Indonesia’s energy security and decarbonisation are legitimate goals, and plenty of countries are looking at small reactors. But promising technology and a convenient delivery model aren’t the same as a safe and sovereign arrangement. For a deal this consequential, Jakarta and its neighbours would be well advised to slow down and read the fine print.
Asia Media Centre
Banner Image - A photo of the reactor. Photo: Rosatom Southeast Asia
Graeme Acton
