Part One
Blame the post-Marcos presidents
EXCEPT for President Rodrigo Duterte, who is just two years into his six-year term, blame the post-Marcos successors, from Mrs. Corazon C. Aquino, her son Benigno S. Aquino III and the three presidents between them, Fidel V. Ramos, Joseph E. Estrada and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, for the continuing rise of oil prices and power rates.
I have detailed the explanation in this series of articles: Start by looking at the country’s energy situation from 1972 to 1985, a specific period of 13 years covered by former President Ferdinand E. Marcos’s total energy plan for the country that was made successful by the right combination of regulated policies that saw the steady, low-cost supply of oil and cheap electricity to consumers.
In that period, the Marcos regime, based on official records, had succeeded in reducing the country’s dependence on Middle East oil, from 92 percent in 1972 to 71 percent in 1980, and further to 57 percent in 1984. By 1985 the Philippines stood as the world’s second-largest user of geothermal power, next to California, resulting further to 44-percent reduction of the country’s dependence on imported oil worth billions of dollars.
To attain its ultimate objective of total electrification of the country, the Marcos administration had the National Power Corp. (NPC) as its arm to do the job. Established in 1936 by President Manuel L. Quezon under Commonwealth Act 120, NPC reached a significant landmark in its corporate existence with the enactment of Republic Act 6395 in 1971, giving birth to a revised charter for NPC.
Recognizing the power industry as the backbone of economic progress, President Marcos issued Presidential Decree (PD) 40, which paved the way for the setting up of island grids with generating facilities and cooperatives for the distribution of power, mainly in the country’s rural areas.
As early as 1972 Marcos authorized the NPC “to own and operate as a single integrated system all generating facilities supplying electric power to the entire area embraced by any grid set up by NPC.” Targeted to be integrated in this “system” were all Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) generating units.
After a long series of negotiations, Meralco sold its power-generating units at P1.1 billion. The acquisition of Meralco’s thermal plants was in line with NPC’s plan to centralize all generating capacities in Luzon as part of the so-called Luzon grid.
In another breakthrough move, Marcos increased the capitalization of NPC to P50 billion in 1978 through PD 1360. This significant increase in capitalization catapulted NPC’s financial strength and capacity to tap other possible sources of power, including nuclear and hydropower developments.
A sleeping giant
In response to the 1973 global oil crisis, the Marcos regime built a nuclear power plant that was supposed to supply the country’s energy demands and further decrease our dependence on imported oil. Thus, the construction of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) began in 1976.
When the BNPP was finished in 1984, with a cost of $2.3 billion, it became one of the world’s state-of-the-art nuclear power stations. The BNPP was designed to withstand an intensity-8 earthquake in the Richter scale, making it sturdier and safer than the Fukushima power plant in Japan, which in 2011 survived an intensity-7 earthquake before the subsequent tsunami incident.
If the plant had operated, it would have produced 621 megawatts of electricity, enough to power at least 10 percent of the power requirements for the Luzon grid. It would have addressed our looming energy crisis. It could have ushered the country into nuclear power and brought our economy at greater heights.
This facility, sitting on a 369-hectare property in Morong, Bataan, remains idle from the time of its completion in 1984 until today. It is a “sleeping giant,” a national asset reduced into an artifact for tourists to see, buried in years of misguided priorities and baseless fear.
Patterned after the Krisko nuclear power plant in Yugoslavia, the BNPP had the same design as the nuclear power plants 1 and 2 of South Korea. The Yugoslavian and the South Korean plants have had no operational problems ever.
The Bataan nuclear plant was scheduled to go into commercial operation in November 1983. This was deferred to 1986 so that additional work could be done to ensure the maximum safety of the plant. This deferment was an offshoot of the accidents in the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the United States and in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Russia. In the end, the commercial operation of the Bataan nuclear plant never happened.
As if by design, nature itself disproved the possibility of radiation leak. A very strong earthquake occurred in Central and Northern Luzon in 1990. Mountain slopes crumbled; buildings, roads and bridges collapsed; and parts of the coastal cities of Dagupan in Pangasinan and San Fernando in La Union sunk. Even Mount Pinatubo, standing a few miles from the nuclear plant, violently erupted. And yet the nuclear plant stood untouched. It suffered no damage, not even a scratch.
Clearly, Cory Aquino was unaware that the nuclear reactor of the Bataan nuclear plant was designed and constructed to withstand the crashing impact of a 747 jumbo jet at full speed.
Surely the decision to abandon the nuclear plant has contributed greatly to the current high cost of electricity in the country. Instead of producing cheap electricity for the people, the nuclear plant has become a white elephant, not far from another white elephant: the multibillion-peso Centennial complex built on order of President Ramos in Pampanga.
To be continued
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.
1 comment
What about the corruption scandal surrounding the BNPP? On how it’s contract jumped from $650M to $2.2B? And what about the safety concerns on how the BNPP was “approved” to be safe even if it really wasn’t?