The Duterte administration should act quickly on the recommendation of an inter-agency committee to include nuclear power in the country’s energy mix as a long-term sustainable solution to ensure stable and cheap power supply, former Pangasinan Rep. Mark Cojuangco said.
“Every summer, we face the same problem: the demand goes up, the reserve capacity becomes thin. We suffer from power outages every year,” said Cojuangco, who is now with Alpas Pinas, an advocacy group for nuclear energy in the Philippines.
“This would have been totally avoidable if early on we already included nuclear power as an option. If we are truly concerned about the environment, then nuclear is the way to go. It is clean and it is reliable,” he told Manila Standard in an interview.
Cojuangco said aside from the mothballed $2 billion Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, the government should consider building “a fleet of nuclear power plants.”
The BNPP, the country’s first and only nuclear power facility that was supposed to generate 623 megawatts of clean energy, was shut down in 1986 due to safety concerns after the Chernobyl disaster in Russia in the same year.
Cojuangco started publicly pushing for the revival of the facility in 2008, but his efforts were put on hold in 2011 after the nuclear plant incident in Fukushima following a 9.0-magnitude earthquake in Japan.
However, subsequent reports from the World Health Organization and the United Nations showed there had been “no adverse health effects” documented after the incident, which left no fatality even as 16 workers were injured.
Last year, Cojuangco met with President Rodrigo Duterte and Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi at the Palace to renew his pitch for the reopening of the mothballed BNPP.
The meeting came months after Duterte issued Executive Order No. 116 in July creating a Nuclear Energy Program Inter-Agency Committee to evaluate and assess the adoption of a national position on the use of nuclear power.
The DOE submitted its recommendation for the inclusion of nuclear power in the energy mix in December 2020.
Dr. Carlo Arcilla, director of the Department of Science and Technology – Philippine Nuclear Research Institute, said the recommendation was in the form of a draft executive order.
“The recommendation that has been forwarded to the desk of the President is a draft executive order. Once signed by him, it will consider the entry of nuclear power into the energy mix. That is what we call the national position,” Arcilla said in February.
The DOE leads the inter-agency committee, with the DOST-PNRI as the vice chair of the NEP-IAC. The Committee is led by the Department of Energy (DOE).
“We in the PNRI will ensure that the guidelines, the safety measures – just in case we pursue the use of nuclear power – should be in accordance with the international best practices so the people should not worry that we cannot maintain this,” he said.
Science Secretary Fortunato dela Peña said should the government decide to implement the nuclear program, the DOST will do its part in ensuring that safety standards are strictly followed.
“The DOST is open to technology. If the decision goes in that direction, we are assigned to ensure the safety,” he said.
In March, the DOST-PNRI and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (ANSTO), Australia’s nuclear agency, signed a memorandum of understanding to pursue collaborations on a wide range of nuclear areas.
“Should the country decide to include nuclear power in the mix, Australia is also one of the leading sources of nuclear uranium fuel,” Dela Peña said.
Cojuangco said the benefits of pursuing nuclear power cannot be discounted.
“Based on the estimate of the National Economic and Development Authority, we will need about 13 gigawatts by 2030. It costs about $600 million per gigawatt of coal or gas that we have to import every year, whereas it only costs $20 million per gigawatt with nuclear power. That is about $7.8 billion worth of importation we could avoid if we go nuclear,” he said.
“We cannot keep on adopting piecemeal solutions. I am asking the government to address the problem once and for all. Whatever economic recovery we are forecasting, that will be derailed if we do not address the long-term need for cheap and reliable supply of electricity,” Cojuangco added.