Last week the Catholic Bishops? Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) threw its weight behind the opposition to the proposed rehabilitation of the mothballed Bataan Nuclear Power Plant. It rejected the opening of the nuclear plant as ?the most dangerous and expensive way to generate electricity.? It said multiple risks and the possibility of corruption (again!) outweigh imagined benefits.

We join the CBCP and other groups opposing the opening of the nuclear power plant because we believe that nuclear power is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. Greenpeace and other organizations have made a strong case against nuclear power plants:

Nuclear power produces radioactive waste that remains dangerous for tens of thousands of years. No proven solution exists for dealing with radioactive waste.

The technology of generating electricity from nuclear fission can also be used to produce nuclear weapons.

Nuclear power plants are a target for terrorist attacks.

Nuclear power is not carbon free. Fossil fuels are needed to run the nuclear cycle, from mining uranium ore to disposing of the radioactive waste.

Nuclear power is expensive and nuclear plants take a long time to build. In India, the country with the most recent and current construction experience, completion costs of the last 10 reactors averaged at least 300 percent over budget. Average construction time for nuclear plants has increased from 66 months in the mid-1970s to 116 months between 1995 and 2000.

The Chernobyl catastrophe proves nuclear power is not without enormous risk. The consequences of a catastrophic accident are immense.

We do not know why certain parties are pushing for the operation of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) when there are less expensive, less risky, less polluting, more readily available alternatives.

One alternative is solar energy ? not just the solar panel type, but the more recent concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) which generates electricity using heat. It?s a silent process and it has no greenhouse gases, no pollution, and the energy source is virtually unlimited, flexible and expandable. The Philippines, being a sun-drenched country, can make greater use of solar energy.

Another alternative is wind power, a completely renewable power source. Wind power won?t pollute air and water, won?t produce dangerous wastes and won?t emit greenhouse gases. As for visual and noise pollution, that can be remedied by building windmills in offshore locations.

And yet another alternative is wave energy which is unlimited, predictable, reliable and renewable. Because water is about 800 times denser than air, the energy density of waves vastly exceeds that of wind, dramatically increasing the amount of energy available for harvesting.

One alternative energy source that is now widely used in the Philippines is geothermal energy. It is one renewable energy technology that can supply continuous, base load power, and the costs for electricity from geothermal facilities are declining.

Ah, but the BNPP proponents say, dismantling the power plant would mean the total loss of about P200 billion spent on it, not including the $9.5 million spent in the late 1980s on a study commissioned by the Senate to study the feasibility of operating the plant.

The Corazon Aquino administration could have refused to pay the corruption-tainted loans used to build the BNPP, but it didn?t. The payment is a fait accompli; nothing more can be done about it. The government can now dismantle the plant to avoid having to pay for maintenance costs, or study the feasibility of converting it into another facility. Or it can be preserved as a very expensive monument to folly and corruption.

Developments in the field of energy are moving in the right direction. In November 2000 the world recognized nuclear power as a dirty, dangerous and unnecessary technology by refusing to give it greenhouse gas credits during the UN Climate Change talks in The Hague. In April 2001, the world dealt nuclear power another blow when the UN Sustainable Development Conference refused to label nuclear power a sustainable technology.

Greenpeace has rightly said that nuclear power ?belongs in the dustbin of history.? There are many safe, renewable, reliable and less expensive sources of energy. Why not study these alternatives, and find out which can be adopted in our country?