Al Cusi, President Rodrigo Duterte’s energy secretary, wants to open a non-political nuclear power plant. And the commissioning of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, Cusi believes, will happen if people stop “demonizing” the mothballed facility and focus instead on the benefits of finally getting it online.
Cusi says that time, nearly 40 years of it, makes a pretty convincing argument for finally opening the Bataan facility. Last Tuesday night’s sudden, unscheduled power interruption seems to help Cusi plead his case, as well.
But it’s mostly the non-stop demonizing of BNPP that Cusi wants to end. He is convinced that if the power plant had not been made a political football, kicked around for four decades because “Marcos built it,” things would have been radically different for the Philippines.
“The whole economy could have been helped significantly over the years by the BNPP’s operation,” Cusi told me. “We were the first in the region to build a nuclear power plant; now we’ve been left behind.”
In 1977, when the BNPP was being built, the 620 megawatts of power it would have produced would have made it the biggest electricity generator in the country and one of the biggest in the region. Now, it would provide the output of one large coal-fired plant.
Not that the plant still can’t help our paper-thin energy reserves, Cusi says. As Tuesday’s power outage proves, we have next to no reserves and no quick way of building up capacity for future demand.
An ordinary power plant takes up to five years to build from scratch. Cusi says that BNPP needs only two to four years to become part of the all-important base load (or source of reliable power) we sorely need.
It will take $1 billion to refit the plant. “I admit that’s a lot of money in absolute terms,” says Cusi, “but if we really want to catch up with ever-growing demand, we need to do this now.”
Finding the financing is easy, compared to the hurdling the political roadblock. Like fighting the burial of Ferdinand Marcos’ remains in a military cemetery, opposing the opening of the nuclear plant has become an article of faith for the Yellows—never mind if Cory Aquino nearly ruined the economy by allowing 12-hour daily blackouts to happen rather than open the facility.
Subsequent administrations all looked into the possibility of reopening the BNPP because they were aware of the benefits. But opening the plant never happened after Cory probably because the other presidents felt that the political cost was just too steep.
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Up to now, I confess I don’t really know what it is about the BNPP that makes the Yellows go crazy. They used to say that building the plant was a huge source of corruption; then they said that it was built on dangerous ground, a claim that persists until today.
Cusi is undeterred by these new claims. “In nearly 40 years, huge typhoons, earthquakes and even the eruption of Mount Pinatubo nearby happened; nothing ever happened to the BNPP,” he says.
And Cusi says that for every scientific study that shows that the BNPP may suffer the same fate as the plants in Fukushima, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, other scientific studies—and yes, time—can show that it is perfectly safe. Cusi even has a clearance from Phivolcs which he says proves the safety of the site chosen carefully for the country’s first nuclear plant.
In the time since the building of the Bataan plant, the technology used to build, operate and maintain nuclear-fired facilities has become very highly advanced. International monitoring of such plants has also been a lot more aggressive, because of what happened in areas affected by nuclear-plant accidents.
Europe, Japan and the US have long relied on nuclear power as an important part of their energy “mix.” China and Asean are rushing plans to build dozens of plants, not only to power economic growth but also to decrease their over-reliance of fossil fuels.
Only Yellows still stuck in anti-Marcos mode cannot accept that a power plant built by the dead dictator is good for the country. And yet, these are the same people who never saw the irony of hosting last year’s Apec summit in Manila to cap Noynoy Aquino’s non-performing presidency at one of the jewels of Imelda Marcos’ massive public infrastructure program, the PICC.
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Cusi knows just how pervasive and well-entrenched the opposition is to the opening of BNPP is: his own boss, Duterte, was originally against its commissioning. “But the president came around when it was explained to him that the benefits far outweigh whatever risks,” the energy secretary said.
Duterte has also championed the burial of Marcos at the Libingan ng Mga Bayani and won over the Yellows’ objections to his plan in the Supreme Court. The difference between that case and the opening of the BNPP is that the power plant can actually help the country in tangible, economic terms, instead of being just a purely political act.
And the cheaper and more reliable energy that the BNPP will provide will benefit the Yellows and Marcos supporters equally—as well as everyone else caught in between the long-running feud between this country’s two most prominent political families. If any administration can open the BNPP over the objections of the Yellows, this has got to be the one.
Or it will probably never open at all, much to our regret.
