Green advocates urged the May 2010 presidential candidates and local political hopefuls to make public their stand on nuclear energy, including plans and policies on energy sourcing, especially that the threat of El Niño will likely to aggravate the country’s energy problem in the coming months.

“We need to find out who among the Presidential candidates will champion renewable energy, and who will insist on resurrecting a dangerous energy source,” Greenpeace Southeast Asia deputy campaign director Mark Dia said.

“The DoE (Department of Energy) signed just last Monday 112 new renewable energy (RE) project contracts, worth US$1.5 billion, which just goes to show that opportunities for clean energy sources abound and just continue to wait in the sidelines for their chance to be harnessed,” he added.

The 14th Congress adjourned last Wednesday without passing the proposed bill to rehabilitate the controversial Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) due to lack of quorum.

Greenpeace has strongly expressed its opposition on the rehabilitation of the BNPP. It noted that the BNPP Bill, authored by Pangasinan Rep. Mark Cojuangco, was supposed to be on this last session’s agenda, among other bills. Cojuangco’s bill did not have a counterpart bill in the Senate.

Greenpeace also pointed out the recent submission of a report by the Korea Electric Power Corporation (Kepco) to the National Power Corporation (Napocor), saying that US$1 billion is needed to rehabilitate BNPP.

Environmentalist urged the Philippine government to instead channel valuable financing and other resources, as well as policies, to RE, which it points out is safer, reliable, and already available.

“It’s ironic that we already have a very progressive RE law, which other countries are trying to emulate, and yet government in its implementation still leans more toward giving concessions for risky, unclean energy sources like coal and nuclear,” Dia said.

Greenpeace recommended candidates to consider a list of facts on nuclear energy that can be taken into account in their platforms.

It said that nuclear power is the most dangerous way to generate electricity, there is also no known scientific solution to safely store plutonium, its deadly radioactive waste-product which remains radiotoxic for 200,000 years.