The Cabinet should now mandate nuclear policy

IN an apparent bid to help the Philippines accelerate the inclusion of nuclear energy into its energy program, a number of foreign experts are converging in Manila in the next few days to explore various ways of “advancing regional cooperation for energy security and economic recovery in the march to decarbonization.”

Billed as the Nuclear Power Forum in Asia, the forum gets under way on September 13-15 at the Bellevue Hotel in Alabang, with international experts from India, Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, Cambodia, the Philippines, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Nuclear Association, the World Association of Nuclear Operators, and the Asean Center for Energy participating.

India leads the list of foreign participants with at least 11 inter-related agencies, including its Department of Atomic Energy, the principal scientific adviser to the government of India, the Department of Atomic Energy Safeguard, the Nuclear Power Corp. of India Ltd., the Bhavini India Nuclear Power Corp., the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, the Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, the Indian Nuclear Society, and the National Disaster Management Authority.

Vietnam is represented by its Ministry of Science and Technology, the Vietnam Atomic Energy Agency, the Vietnam Atomic Energy Institute, the Vietnam Agency for Radiation and Nuclear Safety, the deputy prime minister and chairman of the Central Steering Committee for Natural Disaster Prevention and Control, the Vietnam Disaster Management Authority, and the State Treasury of Vietnam.

Japan is represented by the Japan Electric Power Information Center; Korea by the Export-Import Bank of Korea; and Cambodia by the Ministry of Mines and Energy, the National Committee for Disaster Management, and Cambodia’s Nuclear Energy Association. The Philippines is represented by the Department of Energy, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Office of Civil Defense, and the National Treasurer.

The forum’s declared objective is to “facilitate in-depth discussions on building relationships that will accelerate the process of decarbonization in the Philippines and Asia, using both nuclear and renewable energy sources, and prevent worst-case scenarios like “global boiling” (more extreme than “global warming”).

The Philippines gets 47 percent of its energy supply from coal, 22 percent from gas, 23 percent from hydro and geothermal, and pays the highest electricity cost in Asia on a kilowatt-hour basis — higher than Japan’s. This is seen as the first obstacle to the country’s sustained economic growth.

In 1976, President Ferdinand E. Marcos (1969–1986), father of the incumbent president Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr., built the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) in Morong, Bataan. This was completed in 1984 but was never fueled after political controversy shut it down, with his political adversaries alleging bribery and corruption. These charges were never proved and were ultimately dismissed by a US jury in 1993. There were also allegations that the plant was built close to an earthquake fault and posed an extreme danger to the population. The exact opposite of this was proven.

In 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the tri-boundary of Pampanga, Tarlac and Zambales provinces, burying old towns and cities under tons of steaming lava and suspending most of economic life in Central Luzon. It was the second largest volcano eruption of the last century, after the Novarupta volcano eruption in the Aleutian Range in Alaska in 1912, but it left the BNPP structure in Morong, Bataan, 5 miles away from the volcano, completely unshaken and intact.

To date, the BNPP has had three sister plants operating safely and profitably for the last 30 years in South Korea, Slovenia and Brazil. South Korea, which operates 23 nuclear reactors from which it generates 20.5 GWe of nuclear energy, or 22 percent of its total electrical generation capacity, has offered to rehabilitate the BNPP within five years for $1.1 billion.

Studies have shown that because of Cory Aquino’s decision to mothball the BNPP after she became the revolutionary president following the ouster of Marcos, and the nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl power plant in 1986, the economy decelerated from the uninterrupted power blackouts and from not operating the BNPP. Experts have estimated that the economy lost at least $13 billion by not operating the BNPP.

Informed public opinion seems to agree that the BNPP should be revived and that nuclear energy should be made part of the national energy program, focusing on small and medium-scale reactors strategically distributed across the country’s many islands. The President has spoken clearly and eloquently on this, and the rest of the nation has heard, but there seems to be some difficulty trying to implement his policy directive at the level of the Department of Energy.

Official sources say that during his last meeting in Malacañang with Energy Secretary Raphael P. M. Lotilla and Dr. Carlo Arcilla, director of the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute, the President directed Lotilla to get the program going. But nothing has happened since.

I know Lotilla to be an honest man and one of the nation’s most trustworthy technocrats. In 1994, during our deliberations on the Senate resolution concurring in the ratification of the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization, Lotilla and Ambassador Lilia Bautista, our permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, helped me handle privatization, liberalization, deregulation and tariff reform issues on the floor, and helped Sen. Blas Ople and Sen. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, before she became president, handle some administrative questions.

I have not lost faith in Lotilla, but it is possible he is encountering unseen head winds in trying to comply with the President’s instructions. With the DoE and the DFA working together in the Alabang forum, I hope Lotilla and Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo can find a way to craft the necessary Cabinet directive, making nuclear energy part of our energy program.