The age of darkness threatens a return with so many “brown-outs” in Mindanao itself, where such are never supposed to happen.
Atoms for Peace?
A great technology led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That should not have ended there. So brilliant a discovery by the human mind could not be allowed merely to end in war, holocaust and annihilation but should have led to peace, life and happiness. General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower thought so.
When he quit as General of the Army and became a civilian President, Ike decided that under his watch, splitting the nucleus of an atom should translate into achievements of peace. And so, around Christmas time 1953, his speech before the UN General Assembly entitled “Atoms for Peace,” set the U.S. on a course of strong government support for international use of nuclear power.
Earlier on, in 1951, electricity was generated for the first time by a nuclear reactor. Ike’s predecessor, however, President Harry Truman, was not impressed, and called instead for “aggressive research in the whole field of solar energy.” One wonders if he knew how profoundly right he was – the same guy who bombed those two Japanese cities to kingdom come. But for now, under Eisenhower, nuclear technology would have its due appreciation while the solar energy option was just about thrown into oblivion.
The awesome destructive power of nuclear weapons that the two nuclear explosions over Japan had shown was one thing. But there was something else intimately linked with it and that was nuclear-powered electricity. Scientists had now seen the most concentrated energy available, and that was nuclear energy, made accessible by nuclear reactors. The energy contained in one kilogram of uranium, if it were all to be released in a nuclear reactor, would be equivalent to that produced by burning some 3,000,000 kilos of coal!
The propaganda surrounding atoms for peace got people dreaming … of so-called ‘atomic power’ running a car on an engine the size of a fist, of houses heated by uranium, of ‘atom-powered’ aircraft able to remain aloft indefinitely, of ‘atom-powered’ rockets that would enable us to cross the ocean in three minutes – and so on and so forth. For in fact, the government announced, nuclear-powered submarines were already patrolling the depths of the seven seas.
Modest Market Share
And yet, as of a few years ago, nuclear power provided only 15% of the world’s electricity, with the U.S., France, and Japan together accounting for 56.5% of nuclear generated electricity.The United States produced the most nuclear energy, with nuclear power providing 19% of the electricity it consumed. France, however, produced the highest percentage of its electrical energy from nuclear reactors—78% or more.
In Europe as a whole, nuclear energy provides 30% of the electricity. In the US, while the Coal and Gas Electricity industry is projected to be worth $85 billion by 2013, Nuclear Power generators are forecast to be worth only $18 billion.
Why is this volume of use so low when the power unleashed by nuclear fission has no equal on Earth? Clearly, this “small” figure has less to do with limited resources, technological problems, or geopolitical constraints, than with the low cost of other sources of energy and the widespread fears over the safety of nuclear power plants. Most folk tend to be gardeners, thank God.
Thus, for more than two decades till only lately, there was a steady decline in the fortunes of the nuclear industry around the world. The decline started in the United States in the 1970’s and resulted in the cancellation of over 120 nuclear power plants. Subsequently, one saw the canceling of nuclear power programs and reactors worldwide.
The downward trend accelerated when the true economic and environmental costs of decommissioning and radioactive waste management came to light. The nuclear industry had had almost 50 years to prove that nuclear technology was safe, clean and cheap but failed to do so. Post-tsunami Japan should have ended all arguments, but apparently this is not necessarily so.
Radioactivity
In the nuclear debate, proponents of nuclear energy assert that nuclear power is a compact, reliable sustainable energy source that reduces carbon emissions and increases energy security.Proponents emphasize that nuclear energy’s operational safety record is already very good when compared to other major power plant technologies. They claim that the risks of waste and other environmental impacts are small compared to other sources of electricity and can be further reduced by improved technology in new reactors.
Anti-nuclear organizations, for their part, consider that the economics of new nuclear power plants are unfavorable because of the costs of constructing a nuclear plant, the public subsidies and tax expenditures involved in research and security, the cost of decommissioning nuclear facilities and the undetermined costs of storing nuclear waste.
Nuclear physics and nuclear engineering are, to be sure, specialized subjects that are too important to leave to the specialists alone. What, then, is the story, dear gardeners? A nuclear reactor releases nuclear energy in the form of heat, which is used to generate steam, and the steam to generate electricity – using even conventional electrical equipment. But the nuclear reactor produces and contains enormous quantities of material, which is ‘radioactive’. Some of these are very dangerous to living things, and can stay so for a very long time. They must not be allowed to escape in quantity from nuclear facilities. Such facilities release small amounts of radioactivity to their surroundings during normal operations. Thus, even those appreciative of nuclear power often want it NIMBY (not in my backyard).
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and Japan happened but they were not supposed to. The Three Mile Island accident resulted in a contained melt-down. The Chernobyl event was the result of a fundamentally unsafe reactor design together with a complete ‘lack of safety culture’. And Japan, wail Japan…
In any case they are not supposed to happen again. The governments of the world, led by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), have re-evaluated Nuclear Plant designs and in many cases ordered changes. As a result of these changed requirements that were both expensive and time consuming, new things have been invented. Take, for instance, Westinghouse’s AP1000 technology. It is the “foremost Generation III advanced reactor available on the market now.” (That is not what we were supposed to have in Bataan.)
Defects have been fixed, nuclear proponents swear, and they have increased the safety of nuclear power plants. Instead of relying on active components such as diesel generators and pumps, the AP1000 taps into the natural forces of gravity, natural circulation and compressed gases to keep the core and containment from overheating, Westinghouse said. The design is simpler, smaller and safer and cheaper than current reactors. The US NRC estimates 1 major core damage incident per 2 million years of reactor operation for the AP1000.
So, how safe is safe? A million percent safe, they assure us, except, well, except – they may admit in a low voice…except for occasions of human error and negligence. And critics, of course, are only too quick to point out that in humanity’s history of existence, is there anything more predictable and surer than human error?
Item: As recently as last January 08, 2009, the Essex Chronicle bannered the following news piece- “Radioactive leak at UK nuclear plant”.
Radioactive waste seeped into the ground beneath Bradwell’s Magnox nuclear power station for at least 14 years, a jury heard. The radioactive cocktail of tritium, caesium, cobalt and americium that leaked from a decontamination unit was not discovered until the twin reactors were decommissioned less than a decade ago. The Environment Agency accused Magnox Electric Ltd at Chelmsford Crown Court of unlawfully allowing the leak to occur and failing to maintain its waste disposal system between 1990 and 2004.
Item: Washington, DC, Sept. 18. “Neglect of Safety Costs Ratepayers, Stockholders $82 Billion”.
A new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, Walking a Nuclear Tightrope: Unlearned Lessons of Year-plus Reactor Outages, the first study to analyze every U.S. nuclear power outage lasting a year or longer, shows that 36 of the 51 year-plus outages were caused by “excessive tolerance” by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) of plant owners who did not identify problems early enough or address them effectively. The outages resulting from this poor management and ineffective regulatory oversight have cost ratepayers and stockholders nearly $82 billion in lost revenue, according to the study. “Nuclear power is clearly not safe enough when so many reactors have to be shut down for a year or more,” said David Lochbaum, author of the new report and director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Enter the Philippines
Many poor countries simply have no access to nuclear power, because of the high costs of building a nuclear power plant, the complicated technology involved, or political restraints on nuclear material that can be used both for a power plant and nuclear weapons. During the years of the US-Marcos entente, the Philippines did not belong to this group of poor countries. It was a time when US finance, particularly the US EXIM bank, was an active pusher of loans and the GOP was a terrible loan addict – both US and GOP not quite minding how many generations of yet unborn Filipinos would have to pay for the terrible addiction that normally redounded to the benefit of a few cronies and to the misery of millions of masa and taong bayan.
In fairness, however, the Philippines’ nuclear energy program did not start with President Marcos but much earlier- in 1955, when the country signed on to the US Atoms for Peace program. President Garcia pushed for the creation of the Philippine Atomic Energy Commission and President Macapagal initiated the first UN pre-investment feasibility study for a nuclear power plant in Luzon. However, it was the oil crisis of 1973 that hastened the development of the country’s nuclear program. The Middle East embargo put a heavy strain on the Philippine economy, and Marcos was persuaded that nuclear energy was the best way forward in surviving the energy crisis and reducing dependence on fossil fuels.
Marcos, in fact, decided to build six nuclear power plants. The first was for the Bataan peninsula with a loan from the US Eximbank. In 1974 General Electric was deep into negotiations with Philippine’s National Power to get
the order. But Westinghouse hired a lobbyist who was closer to Marcos, one Herminio Disini who regularly played golf with the President and had an 80% success record of recommendations to Marcos. And so, Westinghouse offered to supply a plant with two 620 Mw reactors at a base price of US$500 million. Other charges like fuel and transmission lines raised the estimated total price to around US$ 650 million (only).
Needless to say, with a little help from Disini, Westinghouse successfully edged GE out. By the time of the formal contract, however, the original plan of getting a twin-reactor plant for US$650 million was no longer feasible. Lobby costs must have escalated, among other things, because the Philippines now had to pay US$722 million for a single reactor plant with half the power output. Adding US$387 million for interest and escalation costs, the contract price rose to US$ 1.1 billion.
When the construction of the plant was completed in 1985, the bill for the Philippine government’s account was over $2.3 billion, or nearly four (or eight) times the initial bid of $600 million. Nuclear fuel was delivered on site in June 1984. By June 1985 a pre-operational core load test was completed. The plant was ready for commercial operations.
As fate would have it, however, the Chernobyl nuclear accident happened on April 25, 1986. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 4,000 people died in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, which contaminated parts of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. President Corazon Aquino suspended the Westinghouse contract and mothballed the plant, citing an international team finding of roughly 4,000 safety defects, in addition to the fact that it was built on an earthquake-prone area. It is located 97 kilometers north of Manila, on a 357-hectare government reservation at Napot Point in Morong, Bataan, only 9 kilometers from Mt. Natib, an active volcano situated between the earthquake-prone Philippine Fault and the West Luzon Fault.
The plant’s design was based on an old two-loop model that had never been thoroughly studied by the US Nuclear Energy Research Center because no similar plant existed in the US. The design was based on a Westinghouse plant still under construction in Yugoslavia, which in turn was based on another plant being constructed in Brazil, which in turn was based on a plant that was never built in Puerto Rico because of earthquake faults. In short there existed no similar nuclear power plant with a safety record of any sort.
A government-commissioned study conducted by the US-based National Union of Scientists Corp. stated that the safety-related defects were so “serious and numerous that it would be uneconomical and dangerous to have it repaired, fixed and possibly ready for operation as a nuclear power plant.”
In December 1988 the Philippine government filed bribery, fraud and racketeering charges against Westinghouse Electric Co. and the
New Jersey-based company Burns and Roe for conniving with former President Marcos and his crony, Herminio Disini, in the construction of the power plant. The government also wanted to cancel the contract and compel the firms to return money paid for the construction of the power plant. At that time, the country had been paying $350,000 a day on interest alone for loan proceeds used to build the plant.
In August 1992, the government and Westinghouse opened talks to settle the bribery allegations. President Ramos rejected Westinghouse’s “final offer” to pay $100 million in cash and credits, upgrade the plant and operate it for 30 years for $40 million a year in exchange for the government’s dropping of the bribery case. Less than a year later his government lost the bribery case. US Court acquitted both Westinghouse and Burns & Roe. Months later, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court also threw out the government’s bribery suits against Burns & Roe, and ruled that the Philippines owed the US engineering firm $1 million in damages.
How judicially unfortunate could a government be? In December 1993, Ramos ever so lamely hinted that the
government was still open to talks with Westinghouse. Two years later, on October 1995, he signed a lopsided $100-million settlement. The Philippine government was now obliged to shell out $300,000 in daily interest payments for the odious loan, a fact so horrible that Supreme Court Associate Justice Reynato Puno was moved to yell, “Don’t! We have no obligation to pay so unjust a loan!”
Under the Ramos-signed agreement, Westinghouse would pay the government $40 million in cash and supply two new 50IF combustion turbines valued at $30 million each, in exchange for allowing the blacklisted company to resume bidding for projects in the country. The government also dropped the bribery case pending on appeal in the United States, and the arbitration case filed in Switzerland. Later the two turbines that were part of the settlement were sold for only $58.3 million.
In July 2004 the Arroyo government revived the graft raps against Disini. The Court ordered his arrest. Disini posted bail and remains a free man.
Meanwhile in April of 2007 the head of the fiscal planning and assessment division of the Bureau of the Treasury announced that the country had made the final payment of $15 million for the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) loans. After almost 32 years, the controversial power plant that had cost the Filipino taxpayer more than an arm and a leg was at long last “officially off the books.” Even though the BNPP had never produced a single watt of electricity, the Filipino people still paid a total of Php120 billion for principal and interest since 1986, the year Aquino acknowledged BNPP to be unsafe.
“But the plant is basically still intact, including the reactor,” Mauro Marcelo, manager of asset preservation for the Energy Department said. Although the plant has been up for sale for decades, he said it was unlikely anyone would want to buy a reactor whose technology dated back to the 1980s.
Then former Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla at one time said that apart from being developed as a monument to folly or a tourist attraction, the property is now under the Asset Privatization Trust.”Since we can’t make use of it as a power plant, it might attract tourists who want to see what a nuclear power plant looks like.”
In any case, the Philippine government has set aside some P40 million a year for its maintenance up to now.
New Challenges: Global Warming versus Nuclear Woes?
Former Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) Secretary Heherson “Sonny” Alvarez, quondam Presidential Adviser on Global Warming and Climate Change, one time said: “A nuclear power plant is wrong for our threatened, fragile earth. Any plan to revive the BNPP should not rest on economic terms alone. It must take into full account a range of social, political, cultural and technical issues. The financial aspects of reviving the BNPP would be daunting. At the current exchange rate, the BNPP’s rehabilitation costs are likely to exceed a billion dollars – or roughly 36% of the estimated P114 billion needed to shield the country from the crippling effects of recession. And that’s just for starters.
“We should factor in the externalities of the Bataan plant’s operation. These externalities include the inherent dangers that the plant poses, the enormous dilemma over spent radioactive waste of over 100 tons yearly that will inevitably impact on health and affect reproduction through genetic mutations. There is also the danger of financial and technological demands of building and maintaining a low accident risk factor.
“There are 493 nuclear power plants (NPPs) in operation globally and only 33 are less than 10 years old. Without adequate final storage, more NPPs mean more waste on the planet threatening the integrity of fragile ecosystems and human societies for thousands up to millions of years.
“A renewed interest in nuclear power plants wants to use their low emission of greenhouse gases as a reason. But it is crucial to remember that, following the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, a safety audit of the BNPP revealed some 4,000 defects. Nuclear plants require a very long and high degree of safety culture, and it does not exist in our country at this time,“ Alvarez said.
And yet, the Department of Energy under the Philippine Energy Plan 2007-2014, expects additional nuclear capacities of 600 MW by 2027, 2030 and 2034.Total capacity from nuclear power plants under the 1998-2035 planning period is expected to reach 2,400 MW. In its latest Philippine Energy Plan (PEP), it was noted that the new nuclear power facility is expected to contribute 0.885 million ton oil equivalent (MTOE) to the projected energy mix and will reach up to 3.54 MTOE by 2035.
Climate friendly?
“Given the severe impact of climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions and skyrocketing crude oil prices, the Energy Department has started a reassessment of nuclear energy as a long-term power option for the country,” said the PEP 2007 executive summary. However, we have to bear in mind that it takes a lot of fossil energy to mine uranium, and then to extract and prepare the right isotope for use in a nuclear reactor. It takes even more fossil energy to build the reactor, and, when its life is over, to decommission it and look after its radioactive waste.
As a result, nuclear energy is by no means the ‘climate-friendly’ technology its proponents and DOE want people to believe. In fact, the energy cost and greenhouse emissions of Nuclear Power are such that they require 7 years of operation to become carbon neutral because of the embodied energy in construction and the energy cost of Uranium mining.
Question: Cannot the projected shortage, say, in 2012 be addressed by building geothermal, hydro power, natural gas, wind, and solar power plants even without the operation of the nuclear plant in Bataan? Must we choose only between global warming and nuclear waste when there are all those other alternative energy sources super abounding in a country close to the equator and which ultimately redound to the health and prosperity of the nation?
Dr. Giovanni Tapang, national chairperson of AGHAM, replies in the affirmative. “The Philippines has many available energy resources from hydro water, geothermal, natural gas, wind and solar sources but these have been all put to sale by the government to private independent power producers (IPPs)”, Dr. Tapang said. Nonetheless they are there.
“In fact, this is the case: the Philippines has 2.8 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves. Geothermal power accounts for the country’s largest share of indigenous energy production, followed by hydropower, coal, and oil and gas. The Philippines is the world’s second largest producer of geothermal power, after the United States. And we do have significant amounts of hydroelectric potential. The most notable development, the Agus units, has been built at the Maria Cristina Falls on northern Mindanao. DOST estimates that wind resources could generate 70,000 MW of power?
“On the other hand, we have to say it clearly: nuclear power is an expensive and dangerous distraction from the real solutions to climate change. Greenhouse gas reduction targets can only be met through using the proven alternatives of renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency.” As somebody from Greenpeace remarked, “Every peso spent on nuclear power is a dollar stolen from the real solutions to climate change.”
According to the Report, ‘Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable Philippine Energy Outlook,’ renewable energy can become the country’s energy backbone. Renewable energy can provide as much as 57% of the country’s energy needs by 2030, and 70% by 2050, with ‘new’ renewables, such as wind, biomass, geothermal and solar energy, contributing as much as 58% to the energy mix.
Congress already passed the Renewable Energy Act, the real solution to energy security and climate change. It is time to focus on its implementation rather than be distracted by the nuclear industry.
For his part, geologist Kelvin Rodolfo refuted claims by lawmakers pushing the revival of the BNPP that the location of the BNPP is safe.
The real problem: nuclear waste disposal
There’s still no safe way to deal with radioactive waste – that is the hard simple fact. What does the government plan – to bury it deep underground? Out of sight, out of mind, for now at least? But no one can guarantee that this highly radioactive waste won’t leak back into the environment, contaminating water supplies and the food chain. High-level waste contains large amounts of substances, which are dangerously radioactive, and will remain so for hundreds of years.
In the US, about 57,000 tons of commercially spent uranium are in temporary storage at nuclear power plants across the country. The congressionally mandated Yucca Mountain depository is only about to be dug up and its planned capacity is about 77,000 tons of high-level waste, according to the NRC. The mountain is in Nevada.
To repeat, what to do with these wastes is a question as yet unanswered. Provisional answers have been proposed, such as deep geological burial and interim management is said to be adequate, but in the long term the question becomes one not of technology but of ethics. Should we create these dangerous substances in ever -increasing quantities, to leave them to our remote descendants of the next few centuries?
Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) from a reactor is highly radioactive. Once the SNF has been removed from the nuclear reactor it is placed in interim storage at the reactor site. Usually this consists of putting the nuclear waste into large pools of water for a short while, meaning 20 to 40 years. As the SNF ages the radioactivity decreases, reaching the point where they can be placed in dry storage facilities. Some components must still be isolated from the environment for 100,000 years or more. The fission products typically reach background levels after 500 years.
Inevitably, to go for nuclear power is to go for the creation of a new highly elite priesthood of dedicated saviors which naturally anarchic populations of self-proclaimed fiesta islands can quite ill afford. What for when there are other energy sources we can go for? Indeed, given that nuclear power poses a threat to life as well as to planet earth itself, why do we continue to travel down the nuclear road?
This gardener wants to believe PNoy when he assures us we aren’t going to.
–FINIS-
Charles Avila -The Gardener
The Gardener’s Tales