IF the Philippines wants to join the community of economically developed nations, it must turn to nuclear power as a source of cheap electricity to power its industries and the homes of millions of consumers, a former antinuclear power activist who is now a passionate advocate of nuclear energy said on Monday.
“Millions of your overseas workers would now be able to use their washing machines and refrigerators and other appliances, and in the near future, if electric cars replaced the combustion engine, it would be nuclear plants that would be the source of cheap electricity to charge their batteries,” said Michael Shellenberger at the Manila Hotel media forum. He is a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and president of a nongovernment organization promoting nuclear power.
Shellenberger is in Manila on the invitation of former Pangasinan Rep. Mark Cojuangco to meet other lawmakers and Department of Energy officials to set the ball rolling on the viability of nuclear energy as a better source of power than renewables like solar and wind power.
He, along with well-known climate scientists and environmentalists, have written to President Duterte, urging the Chief Executive to reduce the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels by switching to nuclear energy.
Shellenberger said the US, Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan “were able to become rich nations by expanding the use of nuclear energy. The Philippines can do the same, but it will require presidential leadership.”
“There’s only one way to rapidly grow the economy while reducing air pollution, and that’s nuclear energy,” he added.
Shellenberger urged the media to spearhead the campaign for the country to go nuclear because he noted that it had been remiss in properly informing the people about the advantages of nuclear power.
Cojuangco said the politicians cannot be relied upon to help spread the gospel of nuclear energy as a cheap source of power, “because politicians are not courageous enough to do it, and they simply follow the flow of public opinion.”
With a PowerPoint presentation, Shellenberger showed how expensive solar power could be, requiring vast areas of flat real estate to set up the solar panels.
Due to the energy density of nuclear fuel, coastal nuclear power plants in the Philippines would require 180 times less land and 17 times less construction materials than solar.
“Solar panels are 100-percent effective at 12 noon but drop to 50 percent at 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., and when the sun sets at 6 p.m., it provides zero power,” he said. He added that solar panels are made of plastic, which would be very difficult to dispose of.
On the other hand, wind turbines are also very expensive to build, requiring areas with high-velocity winds while also posing significant danger to bats and migrating birds.
“To replace just the quantity of the Philippines’s fossil electricity
production from 2017,” he said 193 wind farms at the size of the largest existing one in the country would need to be constructed, covering 1,320 square kilometers and at a scaled cost of P4.5 trillion ($87 billion).
There have been zero fatalities from nuclear plants for the last 60 years with the exception of Chernobyl, which killed two persons but rose to 31 following the disaster itself.
Six Fukushima workers in Japan died when the plant was swamped by a tsunami following a large earthquake in March 2011.
But to go nuclear would take time, and Shellenberger advocates that the country develop a culture of excellence, sophistication and rigorousness. He said nuclear power is the cheapest source of power compared to coal and liquefied natural gas, or other fossil fuels like crude oil.
Coal and crude oil are pollutants that kill 4.2 million a year across the globe from associated illnesses like heart and lung diseases.
“Nuclear power has saved 1.8 million lives by preventing the burning of biomass and fossil fuels,” Shellenberger said.
“On the other hand, nuclear plants do not produce smoke or any form of pollution, and the accumulated nuclear waste are tiny in comparison to the mountains of coal the Philippines uses,” he said
Coal is currently the largest source of electricity in the country and is expected to grow significantly. Half of the coal the country consumes is imported at a cost of about P50 billion ($1 billion) a year.
The Philippines has the 16th-most expensive electricity out of 44 nations, according to a 2016 study by Manila Electric Co.
He said the amount of nuclear waste the United States had produced “can fit in a thirty-foot stack of drums on a football field, while Sweden’s nuclear waste could fill a large room.”
Cojuangco is now a private citizen, and has been advocating for years for the country to go nuclear. He proposes to revive the mothballed Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP). The country has been paying P61 billion for nearly two decades and will still have to cough up P6.3 billion more to pay off the $2.2-billion loans, despite not producing even a single watt of electricity.
Shellenberger said it would take about nine nuclear power plants for provide cheap electricity for the entire country, while Cojuangco said previous studies have shown there are 13 possible sites where a nuclear plant in the country could be built.
The BNPP could be revived at a cost of $1 billion (P50 billion), said earlier estimates.
Image credits: Roy Domingo