SAN JOSE CITY, Nueva Ecija—The chief operating officer of the local biomass power plant here has suggested that the government abandon the controversial Bataan Nuclear Power Plant and build a new nuclear plant in this province or somewhere else.
Edgardo Alfonso, COO of the Lucio Co-controlled San Jose City I Power Corp. here, said given the controversies surrounding the BNPP, the national government should consider to permanently close the facility but open a nuclear plant in other places where it is less risky to operate.
“If you ask me, we can still go nuclear but never mind the BNPP. Forget it. It’s ill advised. Instead, let’s look for a place somewhere, like in Nueva Ecija,” Alfonso said.
One of the viable areas to put up a nuclear plant, Alfonso said, is San Jose, where a number of power plants are already in operation, including the SJCIPC, a 12-megawatt biomass power plant which generates electricity using “ipa” or rice husks.
The P1-billion project, a joint venture of Co, the owner of the Puregold chain of supermarkets, and 21 local rice millers, started operation on a six-hectare lot in Barangay Tulat here in 2014. It uses 300 tons of rice husks on every 24-hour cycle.
The city government has designated Tulat as an industrialized zone where majority of big rice mills are located.
Alfonso said nuclear energy is an expensive investment but is cheap to operate. “And besides, a nuclear plant does not emit toxic pollutants into the air,” he said.
However, he said there are “too many issues” surrounding the $2.3-billion BNPP to merit a second look.
The 620-megawatt BNPP, located in a government reservation in Napot Point in Morong, Bataan, was constructed in 1976.
It was set for commercial operations by then-President Ferdinand Marcos but it was mothballed when Corazon Aquino took power in the aftermath of the 1986 Edsa Revolution due to safety concerns amid the nuclear fire at the Chernobyl power plant in Russia.
The nuclear disaster that took place after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake triggered a tsunami that damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan on March 11, 2011 did not help the BNPP’s case.
American geologist Kevin Rodolfo has warned the government that an active earthquake fault in Pampanga runs through the Natib volcano where the BNPP sits.
The activation of the BNPP is the greatest threat to the well being of the Filipino people and their environment, said Rodolfo, a professor emeritus at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Alfonso said that while the mothballing of the BNPP was a judgment call on the part of the Aquino administration, it was a “terrible mistake” to abandon nuclear energy as an option altogether.
“What we need is a nuclear plant which is new so we can design it well and put in place basic safety requirements and risk assessment,” he said.
