Like the shell of a hermit crab, long abandoned by the hermit, the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, sits, as though waiting for an explanation, or to give one. Perhaps it is waiting to know its raison d’étre, the reason for its own existence.

Like the shell of a hermit crab, long abandoned by the hermit, the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, sits, as though waiting for an explanation, or to give one. Perhaps it is waiting to know its raison d’étre, the reason for its own existence. In exchange, it could tell us why our electric bills are so shockingly high.

Many generations still unborn, will wonder too, since its 621-megawatt light-water nuclear reactor, has never produced even a single kilowatt of electricity. Yet its $2.1 billion cost, is reportedly the single largest piece of the sovereign national debt. This is money the Filipino people are still being robbed of today, and will be for generations yet to come, via automatic appropriation.

It is the great-great-grandmother of all PPAs (= Power Purchase Adjustments, automatically added to the electric bill to finance mainly overpriced contracts with so called “independent püower producers” – the Editor) , the rotten root and its bitter fruit. It is an unavoidable tax, levied equally on the living and on the unborn Filipino, since the government will pay between $200,000 and $300,000 every day or up to P450,000,000 every month until the year 2017, for even less electricity than is in a penlight battery. It was mothballed shortly after it was completed in 1986. That was after it was “discovered” to be sitting on an unstable geological fault line, making earthquake damage an unacceptable risk at its present site, which by the way, is in the shadow of Natib, sister of Pinatubo.

It is a dragon, with a belly built for uranium fire, perfectly preserved in suspended animation, like a bug in amber, just south of the lobster and turtle sanctuary in scenic Morong, Bataan. With no fuel, but said to be operational, it is a nuclear avatar of the evil that lives on after the dictator and his cronies that built and profited from it.

For the record, Westinghouse Corp., whom Marcos chose as contractor for the Napocor’s first nuclear energy project in the ’70s, later admitted in a US court to bribing the former strongman through his golfing partner, Herminio Disini. With a coterie of ever-willing Swiss bankers and Filipino lawyers, Marcos, his cronies and Westinghouse are said to have set up a complex series of companies and corrupt relationships in order to funnel between $17 and $100 million dollars to Marcos, in 1976, while skirting US and Philippine laws to set up the ill-begotten deal.

Later, the Aquino administration sued Westinghouse for redress, after it came to light that the world’s No. 1 nuclear reactor manufacturer, had sold virtually the same model nuclear reactors to other countries for a quarter to half of what Marcos signed up for. In the words of the Napocor chief who had opposed the Westinghouse deal in 1975, “Marcos has purchased one reactor for the price of two.”

But Westinghouse was able to convince a hometown New Jersey jury that it was not guilty under the US Foreign Corrupt Business Practices Act, which in the ’70s still hypocritically condoned certain corrupt practices, a.k.a. bribery and kickbacks, outside the United States, if you could prove they were the normal business practice there. I can just hear the summation of the slick Westinghouse lawyer. “According to the plaintiff’s own Edsa People Power Revolution, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the Marcos regime was entirely a corrupt business practice, which is what my client has claimed all along as the reason for the admitted payments to the President and his cronies. The defense rests.” Case closed.

At that moment, our fate was sealed. The infamous power outages, the brownouts of the late ’80s and early ’90s, and the expensive solution they were given, became unavoidable or inevitable, given our taste for the quick fix. The Filipino people ended up with a huge debt from the World Bank, which some say we are obligated to pay, but don’t deserve to, by the light of a greater justice.

But the present scourge of the PPAs in our monthly electric bills, cannot be fully understood or solved without beholding the nuclear fossil that lives in Morong and learning the lessons it mutely holds. At the very least, we must learn to stand up for our rights and fight for them when righteousness demands, not retreat, as the Aquino administration did in the case of Westinghouse.

The original Edsa People Power Revolution generated a tidal wave of goodwill and admiration for the Filipino people in those days. Why could not such an onerous debt as the one that built our nuclear power plant have been negotiated away, forgiven and forgotten? An opportunity to lighten the burden of the Filipino people was squandered and lost.

It was such a rotten deal! To this day the stench stinks to high heaven. President Macapagal-Arroyo can find no better solution to the PPA mess than to free us from a debt, so venally born in corruption and so unfairly foisted on the unborn.

Borrowing more money is what I suspect, she and a recaptured Philippine Senate are going to do in order to defuse the popularity-puncturing issue of high electricity rates. This will surely make the problem worse in the long run, like sweeping burning embers under the proverbial rug. But with no other choice, the least we can do, is revisit some of the components of the sovereign debt. Our friends, the Americans, will surely agree some were created in the cauldron of corruption they have recently decried through the American ambassador, and with the collusion of some of their citizens and corporations.

The President should not underestimate what goodwill can do between nations. Nor should she be coy about pressing the advantage where our national interests clearly demand concessions from the Americans.

Comments to deanjbocobo@yahoo.com

Dean Jorge Bocobo, Philippine Daily Inquirer, July 22, 2002