P2.3 B for `dead' nuke plant scored

What costs P6 million a day yet doesn't work?

The Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP), which has not produced a single watt of electricity since its construction during the Marcos dictatorship.

A minority congressman revealed that Congress is again allotting P2.3 billion this year to pay for the mothballed facility.

Surigao Rep. Robert Ace Barbers noted that Congress has earmarked P6.3 million a day for paying the debts incurred in the construction of the two-reactor power plant in Morong, Bataan.

He lamented that while all government agencies suffered budget cuts as a result of Congress' decision to reduce this year's appropriation by P22 billion, the allocation for the BNPP's debt servicing remained intact.

Barbers said the budget for BNPP's debt servicing is double that of the Department of Social Welfare and Development and triple that of the Department of Tourism.

"This allocation is 14 times bigger than the go-vernment subsidy to the Philippine Heart Center, 45 times bigger than the budget of the National Anti-Poverty Commission and 105 times bigger than the budget of the National Council for the Welfare of the Disabled," Barbers said.

The BNPP cost $600 million when American firm Westinghouse won the contract for its construction in 1974.

However, the contract price ballooned to $1.2 billion a year later and finally to $2.1 billion after several months.

Experts said the money loaned by foreign and local creditors for the project constituted the biggest part of the $25-billion debt Filipinos incurred during the Marcos regime.

In 1986, then President Corazon Aquino mothballed the 620-megawatt power project.

Yet despite this decision, Aquino still upheld Marcos' Presidential Decree (PD) 1177 which provided for automatic appropriations for debt service.

The Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC) has urged President Estrada to repeal PD 1177, claiming it was clear that the debts the country incurred under Marcos were anomalous.

"Most of the funds ended up in the pockets of the Marcoses, their cronies or their Swiss bank accounts," the FDC insisted.

The President, however, has not acted on the group's suggestion.

As of April last year, the BNPP had an outstanding debt of P11.293 billion which the government will pay until 2018. This amount is on top of the P46.4 billion already paid to creditors from June 1996 to April 1999, with foreign creditors getting the bigger chunk of P23 billion.

Barbers said this year's P2.3-billion allocation will go mostly to payments of principal amortizations (P1.5 billion) while the rest will be for the loans' interest and maintenance of the BNPP.

Unknown to many, the 370-hectare facility is being maintained by the state-owned National Power Corp. (Napocor) at a cost of about P300,000 a day.

There have been calls to convert the facility into a 1,500-watt gas-fired power plant, and the Philippine National Oil Co. (PNOC) has offered to develop the BNPP to run on natural gas.

The conversion, though, would entail another $2 billion in new investments, the PNOC said.

Barbers said that in the meantime, Filipinos can only shake their heads as they again shoulder the cost of debt servicing.

"Truly, the BNPP is an engineering folly, a monument to greed and a continuing calvary for Filipinos," he said.