Nuclear plant is ruled out in the south

NUCLEAR power is not an option for the Visayas and Mindanao because the power plants producing it would be too large for the two markets, Aboitiz Power Corp. said over the weekend.

“You have to build 1,000 or 1,500 megawatts for a nuclear plant. How can you put it in Mindanao, when the entire peak load there is 1,300 megawatts?” Aboitiz chief executive Erramon Aboitiz said.

Mindanao and the Visayas would need extra power soon, but nuclear plants would take time to build, Aboitiz said.

“How long will it take to train people? To build the plant and get the permits?” Aboitiz said.

“The estimate that I got was 10 years.”

Aboitiz also said it would cost between $6 million and $8 million to extract a megawatt of electricity from a nuclear plant, but only $2 million to get a megawatt of power from a coal-fired plant.

Nuclear plants might be feasible in Luzon, but those would affect the natural gas-fired plants in Palawan.

“What do we do with all the gas that we find?” Aboitiz said.

“What do we do with all the gas we expect to find and that we should be using for power generation?”

Energy Secretary Jose Rene Almendras said his department would be willing to study nuclear power, but ruled out reviving the mothballed Nuclear Power Plant in Bataan. –Alena Mae S. Flores, Manila Standard Today