Let’s go nuclear

The power crisis, whether it’s just looming on the horizon or actually extant, must be solved—soon. Our country must have a stable, steady, reliable and green supply of electricity. Otherwise, we will take a very long time solving our mass poverty problem.

Poverty retards our human development. It keeps us from achieving our potential as a people and as a society. It keeps us from having a quality of life similar to that of the ordinary people in American and Europe. It keeps us from moving consistently toward progress just like our neighbors, which were formerly behind us in socio-economic development.

The National Statistics Office keeps giving us good news about our poverty figures—that these have been declining through the years, especially under the present administration. The fact remains, however, that those who are below the poverty line and those who are just on the poverty line plus those who are just marginally above the poverty line make up more than half of the population. These are 40 to 45 million people in families who have problems having three meals a day, sending their children to school, keeping themselves healthy physically and mentally.

Without a stable electric power supply, it would take half a century for the general Philippine population to reach the socio-economic level and physical quality of life of the ordinary Singaporean, Western European and American. That is if we are lucky not to be dragged down by coups, or earthquakes or tsunamis, disasters that because of our failure to develop solidarity as a people we cannot quickly emerge from.

A decade ago experts in global progress and economic growth in Western universities foresaw that the 2000s will be the time when Asia leads the world in progress, production and wealth. The window of opportunity for Asians to be in the forefront of our continent’s leading role is limited to the two or three decades from the start of the millennium.

China and India are performing very well. Japan, which has been a part of the West as far as being a topnotch economy (until only this year Japan was still the world’s second best economy, after the United States), continues to be a world leader and will not decline so badly if it can reverse its aging-population problem. Korea is another leader, with the same aging drawback as Japan and for that matter all the countries of Western Europe.

In Asean, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam are emerging economies that are ahead of the Philippines.

We must do something to have a fighting chance to shoot up to the top—which is the same as saying we must do something to keep ourselves from sliding to the bottom. Which is not going to happen if our only hope for survival are call centers, the BPOs and our OFW economic heroes.

We must do a dozen and more things: we must revive our agriculture and become self-sufficient in food and even an exporter. We must industrialize and make our own basic steel and metal objects—like spoons, forks, beds, bicycles, etc—in addition to having a respectable light-industry sector.

We must have a world-class tourism industry.

And we must improve our educational system.

We must become high achievers in science and technology, including, of course, IT and other advanced areas like cryogenics, because if we don’t we will never be at the front row. If we are not at the front row, we will never be asked to join the Westerners, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Indians and the Koreans in bigtime projects to which the Singaporeans, the Indonesians, the Malaysian and the Vietnamese are invited.

To achieve all the above, and more, however, we must have a stable, steady, bountiful and cheap power supply.

Nuclear power is greenest

We agree with the energy secretary about taking the nuclear option seriously. He began saying this aloud in 2008. We agree with others, like Congressman Mark Cojuangco, in their enthusiasm for nuclear energy but not necessarily with the idea of salvaging the Bataan Nuclear Plant.

If the discarded Bataan plant is proved to be unsafe and more expensive than having a completely new one or a reconditioned plant, then Bataan must be junked. And let’s have something like the one from South Korea that was the subject of our banner story on Thursday.

Despite the objection of environmentalists, nuclear energy, as most recently improved and developed, is now the greenest, the most environment-friendly technology. The problem has always been how to dispose of nuclear wastes. But the latest technologies that have been developed do not have the same problems as the old systems.

These advanced technologies are the ones that US President Barack Obama the other day was referring to when he spoke about making the development of cheap and safe nuclear energy an important new focus of his economic program.

While going nuclear, we should not abandon our efforts to foster hydro, wind and sun power.

But it is going nuclear that will help most effectively in boosting our socio-economic development fastest and most effectively. –Manila Times