EDITORIAL: Electricity: Reflections on our nuclear option

Manila Times.net

Bataan Nuclear Power Plant

JAPAN’S earthquake-tsunami devastation damaged three of its old nuclear power plants. But there is apparently no real reason—yet—to worry about a Chernobyl-like meltdown in these facilities.

But all over the world the knee-jerk reaction of some, including advocates of nuclear power, is to forswear it.

We Filipinos have been considering the nuclear option to solve our problem of very costly electricity. This problem contributes hugely to our slow socio-economic development.

The high cost of electricity deters large-scale foreign investors in manufacturing and retailing from opening major operations here.

High power costs also keep a true boom in housing and roadbuilding from happening. The constraints on foreign investment, and industrial, agri-business and commercial activities, caused by expensive electricity limit domestic job creation.

High electricity costs also affect education and cultural flowering.

In fact, because it costs so much to provide electricity to remote mountain and island areas in our archipelago, many of our barangays do not have power at all. Until these places are electrified, our fellow citizens there would never get to join the knowledge society that depends on computers. And even in the urban and semi-urban areas, high power costs force schools to be dimly lit, producing many dim-witted graduates.

Dominant economies use nuclear power
The world’s most well-developed and outstanding economies, almost without exception, use electricity generated by nuclear power plants. Some use nuclear power for up to 50 percent of their electricity needs. The US consumption of nuclear power is only about 20 percent of its total needs. But because of the size of the American economy (No. 1 in the world), its population and cities, America is the planet’s largest producer of commercial nuclear power. In France, most of the electricity comes from nuclear plants. But in Japan only one-third of consumption is nuclear-plant generated.

What happened in Japan?
Agence France-Presse summarizes it this way:

“An explosion rocked a building housing a nuclear reactor at a quake-damaged Japanese power plant Monday, the second such blast in two days, and the cooling system failed at a third reactor.

“The new troubles at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, located 250 kilometers (120 miles) north of Tokyo, stalled Japan’s efforts to secure the atomic power facility in the wake of Friday’s massive quake and devastating tsunami.

“Officials said the container surrounding the plant’s number-three reactor was not breached in Monday’s blast and there was no major rise in radiation levels.

“A similar explosion hit the building housing the number-one reactor at the plant on Saturday, the day after a 8.9-magnitude earthquake generated a wall of water that swamped a large swathe of the country’s Pacific coast.

“Chief government spokesman Yukio Edano also said the cooling system at the number-two reactor had stopped after the blast. Water levels were falling and workers were preparing to douse it with sea water, he said.

“Jiji Press, quoting officials from plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), said officials are considering making a hole in the building to release hydrogen.

“The earlier explosion was caused by a build-up of hydrogen in the number-three reactor building, Edano said, but pressure in the reactor remains stable.

“‘The soundness of the reactor container has been maintained. The figures do not indicate a high level of radiation,’ he said.

“Officials who have been battling a possible partial meltdown are injecting sea water into the reactors to replace lost coolant—a procedure that will render the 40-year-old plant unusable.

“The nuclear plants shut down automatically during a quake, but the loss of power in the area and tsunami damage to back-up generators apparently shut down cooling systems.”

Wild, false text messages
Worldwide, wild text messages have been flying, falsely saying that radiation from the three Japanese nuclear power plants has already contaminated the air. Some pseudo-authorities and scare-mongers have even ignorantly warned against “toxic acid rain” as products of the radioactive emissions from the Japanese plants.

The fact is until this writing Japanese authorities are firmly discounting a Chernobyl-like meltdown and disaster.

Don’t count out nuclear but let’s think hard and deep
Expectedly, those who are against any kind of nuclear-power generation in our country are using the Japanese situation to boost their viewpoint.

And even our most zealous advocate of nuclear power, former congressman Mark Cojuangco, last Monday has declared a moratorium on his support of nuclear energy. He said in a statement: “In the light of Fukushima, I would like to say that now is the opportune time, the right time, for the whole world’s nuclear power industry to be in a period of introspection . . . they should examine events like Fukushima and see if all the assumptions of safety of nuclear power are still valid, and if adjustments are to be made, what are they.”

Mr. Cojuangco is right, and especially so because what he wrongly proposed was the revival of the mothballed—and paid for—Bataan Nuclear Power Plant of unpleasant memory.

If we want to have a better chance of rising to the economic and quality-of-life level of a First World country, we must have much cheaper electricity than we have now. Nuclear energy is the cheapest by far. And it seems also to be the safest—especially the most advanced models designed.

If we do decide to go nuclear, we definitely must not go back to the Westinghouse-supplied BNPP, which is of the old type like the troubled GE plants in Fukushima.

What we must have should be the very latest. They are very much more expensive but very safe. They are said to have greatly minimized the problem of radioactive waste disposal by precisely making the waste reusable. In other words, this state of the art model of nuclear power plant can perpetually power its own power requirement to generate power by using its own waste.

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