Nuke plant budget cut sabotage — Cojuangcos

PANGASINAN Rep. Kimi Cojuangco and her husband Mark on Sunday warned that the Palace will be committing “conspiracy and economic sabotage” by removing a P50-million budget allocation for the annual maintenance of the mothballed Bataan Nuclear Power Plant to pave the way for its permanent closure next year.

The Cojuangcos also revived their campaign to operate the 620-megawatt plant, since the government had completely paid off the debts worth $2.12 billion in 2007.

“The BNPP is already fully-paid. If we put up a new plant similar to the capacity and size of the BNPP, it would cost us $5 billion to $6 billion,” Mark Cojuangco said.

The Cojuangcos also opposed the government’s efforts to sell the nearby 44-hectare Nuclear Village in Bagac and the 356-hectare BNPP complex to raise funds.

The Cojuangcos said they learned that the government is considering converting the BNPP complex into a coal plant, which they oppose, even though the Cojuangcos have investments in coal.

In a letter to National Power Corp. president Froilan Tampinco on June 21, 2013, Budget Secretary Florencio Abad said that for fiscal year 2014, “no amount shall be spent for the BNPP until a final decision has been made by the Department of Energy as to its use as approved by the President of the Philippines.”

“What the government officials are doing is a sabotage,” said Mark, who gave journalists a tour of the Bataan complex.

“It is a sabotage because the Palace knew there was a continuing effort in Congress to have the BNPP plant tapped to augment the power supply in Luzon to attract investors and provide jobs to Filipinos,” Mark said.

In the 14th Congress, Mark, who was then a congressman, filed a bill seeking to rehabilitate the plant.

His wife pursued his advocacy in the 15th Congress and filed a bill to get Congress to decide whether it should be reopened or decommissioned.

The reelected congresswoman said she will have to consult her colleagues before she decides whether to refile the bill.

Mark said he believed a “conspiracy and sabotage” were in the offing because once the BNPP’s maintenance was stopped even for one year, the plant would incur damage and deteriorate.

“Without proper maintenance, the BNPP plant, whose turbines and water generators needed to be run 24/7 and the other parts once a month will definitely result in damages and people would be made to believe that the plant can no longer be operated – which we now know is intentional,” Mark said.

Since the plant was well-maintained, Cojuangco said it was still on target to run three years to get it ready for commercial operation to produce power, he said.

Mark Cojuangco said the 620 MW would help lower electricity rates because it can be sold for as low as P2.50 per watt as against the present rate of P11 per watt in Luzon because the coal or diesel fuel was expensive compared to the more efficient and cleaner technology of the BNPP.

Kimi Cojuangco’s BNPP bill had already garnered the support of some 197 congressmen when the nuclear plant accident in Fukushima, Japan occurred due to the magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami.

“No one died from the Fukushima nuclear plant accident. We have learned a lot from it and we want to reassure the public that it will not happen to us in the Philippines,” Mark Cojuangco said.

He said the Fukushima nuclear plant was a relatively old boiler water reaction reactor plant compared to the newer pressurized water reactor that Westinghouse built for the Philippines.

The plant, he said, was designed to automatically cool down temperatures to avoid any kind of explosion, he added.

When the Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened, the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos had required that the plant be placed in an area that could protect it from natural disasters.

“What happened in Fukushima could not happen in the Philippines because the BNPP plant is located 19 meters above sea level,” Cojuangco said.

He said Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology chief Renato Solidum had issued a certification that the BNPP was “not sitting on an earthquake fault.”

“Phivolcs chief Solidum said the BNPP plant could be safe five meters away from the fault so I asked how far is the BNPP from the fault and he said the nearest fault was 60 kilometers away,” Cojuangco said.

“The Marcos government contracted loans from the US Eximbank and the World Bank for the BNPP plant as early as 1976. It took long to build the plant because several safety measures were put in place as required by the late President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. following protests on the safety features of the nuclear plant,” Cojuangco said.

Marcos, he said, had accommodated all the complaints and created a commission to study the safety measures that should be put in place.

“By the time it was ready to test run in 1985, the country was already in political turmoil and the 1986 Edsa I revolution had overtaken the test run,” Cojuangco said.

Shortly after the late President Corazon Aquino came to power, she ordered the BNPP mothballed, charging that it was “graft-ridden.”

But Cojuangco said the Philippine government’s demand to add safety features made the project more expensive.

The country paid for the principal amounting to $699 million and a total interest of $1.4 bringing the total loan obligation to $2.118 billion.

The loan included the 44-hectare Nuclear Village, where the NPC hotel was located.

Several kilometers away from the plant’s complex, the Nuclear Village is where the “remote control” office was located to monitor the plant. It also housed the Filipino and American engineers when the plant was being constructed and when international engineers came to the Philippines to check on the plant even if it was mothballed, he said.

The sale of these combined 400-hectare properties at P10,000 persquare meter owing to the infrastructure and development in the area would fetch a minimum of P40 billion, the Cojuangcos said.

“So there is no way we would allow the government to sell the Nuclear Village and the BNPP complex. The P40 billion that would be raised from it would be peanuts compared to the benefit that the entire country would realize from the actual use of the plant,” Cojuangco said.

Since 2010, when Mark’s cousin President Benigno Aquino III assumed office, the Department of Budget and Management has been trying to remove the annual P50 million BNPP maintenance allotment, he said.

“For the past three annual budget deliberations, it has always been a struggle for us in Congress to have the P50-million budget restored during appropriations committee hearings. We have been successful so far and we are surprised that Secretary Abad is at it again and even reduced the P50 million budget to only P14.16 million,” Cojuangco said.

Cojuangco blamed Abad, Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman and Education Secretary Armin Luistro for working to close the plant for good.

“The President’s men and this triumvirate had been blocking the revival of the BNPP by stressing that the mothballing was the President’s legacy,” Mark Cojuangco said.

“Not all Marcos projects are evil like they try to portray and BNPP can hardly be called evil because it would bring progress to the country and help Filipinos obtain gainful employment,” added Kimi Cojuangco.

“If we are to shun the Marcos projects, we might as well stop stepping on the roads that Marcos built, as well as using the Philippine General Hospital, the Heart Center, the Philippine International Convention Center and the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Let us not be hypocrites,” said women’s advocate Elizabeth Angsioco, president of the Democratic Socialist Women of the Philippines and a columnist for the Manila Standard.

Abad’s letter rejected the proposed P14.16 million budget for BNPP with breakdown P1.23 million for personnel, P9.78 million for maintenance and other operating expenses and P3.14 million in capital outlay.

The BNPP plant is now manned by nuclear engineers and staff numbering about 30 and 28 security guards protecting the entire 356-hectare complex and 44-hectare village, said engineer Reynaldo Punzalan. –Christine F. Herrera, Manila Standard Today