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BALANGA City, Bataan: Bishop Socrates “Soc”
Villegas on Monday issued a strongly worded pastoral statement
opposing the proposal to operate the mothballed Bataan Nuclear Power
Plant (BNPP) in Napot Point, Morong, Bataan.
The outspoken bishop of the
diocese of Balanga said that if government would operate the BNPP,
the result would be more tragic than World War II that saw the
“Fall of Bataan” on April 9, 1942. “In a matter of time, the
world could be remembered with ‘Bataan has exploded’ in a more
sensational way than ‘Bataan has fallen,’” he said.
Villegas said that Bataan is a
peninsula lying on a major earthquake fault that a nuclear accident
would result in a tragedy that would plunge the country into a
disaster in the likes of the Chernobyl.
The bishop said that the BNPP has
long been declared unsafe for two reasons that he placed as
impossible to refute. First, it was built at the foot of the dormant
volcano Mount Natib. He claimed that had it been operational at the
time Mount Pinatubo erupted, “the devastation would have been
tremendously incalculable and unimaginably catastrophic.”
Second, the construction of the
plant was attended by numerous irregularities among contractors,
especially in the part of government. The bishop charged that the
nuclear power plant became the most visible and flagrant symbol of
corruption in government.
The former spokesman of the late
Jaime Cardinal Sin appealed to the national leadership to see the
adverse effects of nuclear power on the rest of the world more than
merely training its eyes on the present energy crisis.
He said that there is still no
safe and permanent technology for the disposal of radioactive waste
materials from nuclear power plants in First-World countries. He
claimed that the operation of BNPP poses threats to the marine life
around the Bataan peninsula with the heat that nuclear power plants
discharge into the ocean.
“Do we want to imperil the
future of our children and our land for the slight comfort of having
low electricity cost now?” Villegas asked this question.
He said that he and other priests
have to react after the present administration has floated the idea
of reviving the BNPP.
Rev. Fr. Percival Medina, parish
priest of the St. Joseph Cathedral in Balanga City, said more than
50 priests from Bataan attended the four-hour Study/Discerment
Session on Nuclear Power Plant on July 3.
Speakers were Nicanor Perlas,
president of the Center for Alternative Development Initiatives and
Sister Ma. Aida Velasquez, a nun assigned in Morong in the 1970s
until early 1980s at the height of anti-government rallies in
opposition to the BNPP.
--Ernie B. Esconde
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