(Conclusion)

Congress wants to spend P10 million on a new study that will find out if the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant can be rehabilitated and finally used. If approved, this will be just the latest infusion of taxpayer money for a plant that never produced a single watt of electricity despite all the billions poured into building and paying for it.

How much, exactly, did the government pay for what has become known as the biggest debt incurred by the Philippines for a single project? In 1984, when the 621-megawatt plant was completed eight years after work commenced, the government said the project eventually cost a total of $2.3 billion.

But that was definitely not the total bill paid for by taxpayers for a power plant that was never activated. Bataan Gov. Enrique ?Tet? Garcia, speaking this week against the plan in Congress to study the rehabilitation of the plant, offered a ?conservative estimate? of more than 10 times that amount, or $27.6 billion (nearly P1.4 trillion today), including interest accumulated over the years on the original debt, supposed profit that was not acquired and opportunity losses.

The government finally paid off the debt incurred on the useless power plant just two years ago, more than three decades after work on it began. It didn?t help that succeeding administrations suspected?though they never proved? that the contract to build the plant was greatly overpriced to benefit the contractors and certain cronies of the Marcos administration that ordered it built.

In fact, a bribery suit filed by the Philippine government against the plant?s builder, Westinghouse, was eventually dismissed by a US court. Marcos-era energy officials and other cronies linked to the Bataan plant also escaped prosecution in the Philippines.

In the meantime, various proposals to activate the plant or to convert it into a coal- or oil-fired generating facility were put forth, but all were rejected because of financial, safety and environmental concerns and objections by anti-nuclear groups and local residents.

After the Energy Department announced last year that it was considering the use of the power plant because of spiraling oil prices, Malaca?an Palace has taken the position that plans to activate the plant are still under review. ?We are listening to all sides of the issue. We are not for or against [BNPP?s operation],? Press Secretary Cerge Remonde said in a recent interview.

The Arroyo administration?s official shilly-shallying on the power plant has contributed to the muddling of the issue and has probably encouraged Congress to revive plans to get the power plant online. If only that were truly as easy as it sounds.

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The fact of the matter is, rehabilitating the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant would probably cost a lot more than even the $800 million estimated by the Energy Department for the purpose last year. And this amount, proposed by Energy Secretary Angelo Reyes after a team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency visited the plant, isn?t even guaranteed to remedy all the problems of a power plant that is nearly 30 years old and has never before been used.

In its actual report, the IAEA made it clear that its role did not extend to assessing whether the power plant was usable or not, or how much the cost to rehabilitate it would be. The inspectors did, however, recommend that the power plant?s status must be thoroughly evaluated by technical inspections and that economic evaluations should be conducted by a committed group of nuclear power experts, stressing that the proper infrastructure, safety standards and knowledge are of utmost importance if the plant was to ever go online.

Ultimately, an issue against the power plant that cannot be resolved even by all the money in the world is its location along a major earthquake fault line and between two volcanos?including the once-dormant Mt. Pinatubo. Had the eruption of Pinatubo taken place while the Bataan plant was already operational, a disaster on the order of Three Mile Island in the US and Chernobyl in Russia would have happened locally, as well.

It is important to remember that the Bataan plant?s construction was delayed significantly by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, an event which forced local proponents and US contractor Westinghouse to review the plant?s plans for possible defects. And mere days after the Chernobyl disaster in April 1986, the Aquino administration that succeeded Marcos? decided to mothball the Bataan plant, using as a basis later on a study that found thousands of defects in the plant?s construction and dooming the facility to its current fate of never being used.

But because all administrations after Marcos have kept the plant shut while continuing to maintain it, proposals to open the facility still come up from time to time, like the one now in Congress that was proposed by Pangasinan Rep. Mark Cojuangco. And while the current bill contains a provision that orders the dismantling of the power plant if new, conclusive studies find that it is truly unusable, it is not certain if this will ever come to pass.

More likely, each administration since Corazon Aquino?s has probably had powerful defenders of the Bataan nuclear plant, people who believed it could still be used for its original purpose and in its original state?despite all evidence to the contrary and the humongous amounts that have been spent for its construction and upkeep. Why it never occurred to these administrations that perhaps building a new, safer, more efficient and definitely less expensive nuclear plant somewhere else is the solution must be one of Philippine history?s enduring mysteries.

Perhaps the current Congress proposal should get approved, if only because any honest-to-goodness study will find that the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant is truly as totally useless and potentially destructive as it is record-breakingly expensive. And then maybe, more than 30 years after it should have been done, the plant will finally be torn down and its parts sold for scrap.