Agence France-Presse 11:39 am | Saturday, October 29th, 2011 THE HAGUE – The International Criminal Court said Friday it was in contact with slain Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s son Seif al-Islam over his surrender, as NATO decided to end its mission in Libya. Luis Moreno-Ocampo warned however that the ICC head learned that a group of mercenaries had offered to move Seif to an African country that was not party to the ICC’s founding document, the Rome Statute. “Through intermediaries, we have informal contact with Seif,” the prosecutor said in a statement issued at the court’s headquarters in The Hague. “The Office of the Prosecutor has made it clear that if he surrenders to the ICC, he has the right to be heard in court, he is innocent until proven guilty,” Moreno-Ocampo said. “The judges will decide.” After learning that a group of mercenaries had offered to move Seif to an African state not bound to hand him over to the ICC, his office was “exploring the possibility” of intercepting any plane carrying him to make an arrest. Seif, 39, and Gadhafi’s security chief and brother-in-law Abdullah al-Senussi, 62, are the most wanted fugitives from the slain despot’s inner circle. They are wanted by the ICC on charges of crimes against humanity, committed after the start of the uprising against Gadhafi’s regime in mid-February. The ICC issued arrest warrants against Kadhafi, Seif and Senussi on June 27. Interpol issued “red notices” for their arrest on September 9. Following Gadhafi’s death, Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble and Moreno-Ocampo issued a joint statement last week urging Seif to turn himself in, promising him safe passage to The Hague. But in Tripoli, interim justice and human rights minister Mohammed al-Allagi of Libya’s National Transition Council (NTC) said Seif would be tried in Libya if he were caught there. “If he were caught in Libya, Libyan law states that he would have to be tried here. But he would be entitled to a fair trial,” Allagi said in response to a journalist’s question. But the international justice director at New York-based Human Rights Watch said a fair trial in Libya could not be guaranteed. A Libyan trial “on these complex crimes in a highly charged environment is not likely to render justice in an independent way”, Richard Dicker told Agence France-Prese. Gadhafi’s “gruesome” death last week had highlighted Libya’s volatility, he said. “Seif al-Islam’s appearance before the ICC will best ensure that justice is done,” he added. Whether or not Seif decided to surrender, he and Senussi must be allowed to do so safely and their rights “guaranteed”, rights group Amnesty International urged. “The National Transitional Council and neighboring governments must ensure their safe detention and prompt transfer to The Hague for investigation, whether they surrender voluntarily or are arrested and transferred,” spokesman Marek Marczynski said in a statement. Long the heir to Kadhafi’s regime, Seif was also referred to as his father’s “de facto prime minister”, controlling the regime’s finances and logistics, while Senussi controlled its security organs. The exact whereabouts of the two remain unknown. But security sources from both Niger and Mali said Thursday that Senussi had crossed from Niger into Mali, with sources claiming he was under Tuareg protection. NATO meanwhile said it would end its mission in Libya on October 31, declaring it had fulfilled its mandate to protect civilians. It called on the new regime to build a democratic Libya. “We have fully complied with the historic mandate of the United Nations to protect the people of Libya, to enforce the no-fly zone and the arms embargo,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in a statement. “Operation Unified Protector is one of the most successful in NATO history,” he said after NATO ambassadors formally agreed to end it. Alliance warplanes will wind up the mission on Monday after flying more than 26,000 sorties and bombing almost 6,000 targets in a seven-month operation that helped a ragtag rebel force oust Gadhafi. The conflict ended in controversial fashion when Gadhafi was shot dead on October 20, a killing that was criticized even by Western allies of the interim NTC regime. Facing global criticism over Gadhafi’s death, the NTC vowed on Thursday to bring his killers to justice, a sharp break with its previous insistence he was caught in the crossfire with his own loyalists. While NATO has denied targeting Gadhafi during the campaign, it was an alliance air strike that hit his convoy as it fled Sirte, leading to his capture and killing. Complete stories on our Digital Edition newsstand for tablets, netbooks and mobile phones; 14-issue free trial. About to step out? Get breaking alerts on your mobile.phone. Text ON INQ BREAKING to 4467, for Globe, Smart and Sun subscribers in the Philippines.
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Agence France-Presse 11:39 am | Saturday, October 29th, 2011 THE HAGUE – The International Criminal Court said Friday it was in contact with slain Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s son Seif al-Islam over his surrender, as NATO decided to end its mission in Libya. Luis Moreno-Ocampo warned however that the ICC head learned that a group of mercenaries had offered to move Seif to an African country that was not party to the ICC’s founding document, the Rome Statute. “Through intermediaries, we have informal contact with Seif,” the prosecutor said in a statement issued at the court’s headquarters in The Hague. “The Office of the Prosecutor has made it clear that if he surrenders to the ICC, he has the right to be heard in court, he is innocent until proven guilty,” Moreno-Ocampo said. “The judges will decide.” After learning that a group of mercenaries had offered to move Seif to an African state not bound to hand him over to the ICC, his office was “exploring the possibility” of intercepting any plane carrying him to make an arrest. Seif, 39, and Gadhafi’s security chief and brother-in-law Abdullah al-Senussi, 62, are the most wanted fugitives from the slain despot’s inner circle. They are wanted by the ICC on charges of crimes against humanity, committed after the start of the uprising against Gadhafi’s regime in mid-February. The ICC issued arrest warrants against Kadhafi, Seif and Senussi on June 27. Interpol issued “red notices” for their arrest on September 9. Following Gadhafi’s death, Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble and Moreno-Ocampo issued a joint statement last week urging Seif to turn himself in, promising him safe passage to The Hague. But in Tripoli, interim justice and human rights minister Mohammed al-Allagi of Libya’s National Transition Council (NTC) said Seif would be tried in Libya if he were caught there. “If he were caught in Libya, Libyan law states that he would have to be tried here. But he would be entitled to a fair trial,” Allagi said in response to a journalist’s question. But the international justice director at New York-based Human Rights Watch said a fair trial in Libya could not be guaranteed. A Libyan trial “on these complex crimes in a highly charged environment is not likely to render justice in an independent way”, Richard Dicker told Agence France-Prese. Gadhafi’s “gruesome” death last week had highlighted Libya’s volatility, he said. “Seif al-Islam’s appearance before the ICC will best ensure that justice is done,” he added. Whether or not Seif decided to surrender, he and Senussi must be allowed to do so safely and their rights “guaranteed”, rights group Amnesty International urged. “The National Transitional Council and neighboring governments must ensure their safe detention and prompt transfer to The Hague for investigation, whether they surrender voluntarily or are arrested and transferred,” spokesman Marek Marczynski said in a statement. Long the heir to Kadhafi’s regime, Seif was also referred to as his father’s “de facto prime minister”, controlling the regime’s finances and logistics, while Senussi controlled its security organs. The exact whereabouts of the two remain unknown. But security sources from both Niger and Mali said Thursday that Senussi had crossed from Niger into Mali, with sources claiming he was under Tuareg protection. NATO meanwhile said it would end its mission in Libya on October 31, declaring it had fulfilled its mandate to protect civilians. It called on the new regime to build a democratic Libya. “We have fully complied with the historic mandate of the United Nations to protect the people of Libya, to enforce the no-fly zone and the arms embargo,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in a statement. “Operation Unified Protector is one of the most successful in NATO history,” he said after NATO ambassadors formally agreed to end it. Alliance warplanes will wind up the mission on Monday after flying more than 26,000 sorties and bombing almost 6,000 targets in a seven-month operation that helped a ragtag rebel force oust Gadhafi. The conflict ended in controversial fashion when Gadhafi was shot dead on October 20, a killing that was criticized even by Western allies of the interim NTC regime. Facing global criticism over Gadhafi’s death, the NTC vowed on Thursday to bring his killers to justice, a sharp break with its previous insistence he was caught in the crossfire with his own loyalists. While NATO has denied targeting Gadhafi during the campaign, it was an alliance air strike that hit his convoy as it fled Sirte, leading to his capture and killing. Complete stories on our Digital Edition newsstand for tablets, netbooks and mobile phones; 14-issue free trial. About to step out? Get breaking alerts on your mobile.phone. Text ON INQ BREAKING to 4467, for Globe, Smart and Sun subscribers in the Philippines. Buoyed by the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York City, protests swept across Asia, the Americas and Europe on Saturday, with hundreds and in some cases tens of thousands expressing discontent at corporate greed and rising unemployment.
In Rome, small groups of restive young people turned a largely peaceful protest into a riot, setting fire to at least one building and a police van and clashing with police officers, who responded with water cannons and tear gas. The police estimated that dozens of protesters had been injured, along with 26 security officials; 12 people were arrested. At least 88 people were arrested in New York, including 24 accused of trespassing in a Greenwich Village branch of Citibank and 45 during a raucous rally of thousands of people in and around Times Square. More than 1,000 people filled Washington Square Park at night, but almost all of them left after dozens of police officers with batons and helmets streamed through the arch and warned that they would be enforcing a midnight curfew. Fourteen were arrested for remaining in the park. Other than Rome’s, the demonstrations across Europe were largely peaceful, with thousands of people marching past ancient monuments and gathering in front of capitalist symbols like the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Similar scenes unfolded across cities on several continents, including in Sydney, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Toronto, Chicago and Los Angeles, where several thousand people marched to City Hall as passing drivers honked their support. But just as the rallies in New York have represented a variety of messages—signs have been held in opposition to US President Barack Obama yards away from signs in support of him—so did Saturday’s protests contain a grab bag of sentiments, opposing nuclear power, political corruption and the privatization of water. Widening gap Yet despite the difference in language, landscape and scale, the protests were united in frustration with the widening gap between the rich and the poor. GREEK TRAGEDY Greek activists, inspired by the Spanish Indignants, cover their ears, mouths or eyes in Athens’ Syntagma Square in front of the Greek parliament. AFP “I have no problem with capitalism,” Herbert Haberl, 51, said in Berlin. “But I find the way the financial system is functioning deeply unethical. We shouldn’t bail out the banks. We should bail out the people.” In New York, where the occupation of Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan was moving into its second month, a large crowd marched north early on Saturday afternoon to Washington Square Park, where it was joined by several hundred college students who decried, among other things, student debt and unemployment. “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!” protesters chanted from within police barricades. In late afternoon, the crowds marched up Avenue of the Americas toward a heavily barricaded Times Square, beseeching onlookers to join in with cries of “You are the 99 percent.” For the protesters, marching on Times Square held almost as much significance as did protesting against Wall Street. “Times Square represents business as usual—buy, buy, buy in this economic climate, watch the latest show,” said Elias Holtz, 29, a Web designer who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. “But the crisis is everywhere.” Time for people to rise Two dozen people were arrested at a Citibank branch on LaGuardia Place on trespassing charges. Citibank, in a statement, said the protesters “were very disruptive and refused to leave after being repeatedly asked, causing our staff to call 911.” In Washington, several hundred people marched through downtown, beginning in the early morning, passing by several banks. Escorted by the police, the marchers also demonstrated in front of the White House and the treasury department before moving on to a rally on National Mall, where they were joined by representatives of unions and other supporters. The protests were inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States and the Indignants in Spain, targeting 951 cities in more than 80 countries around the globe. It was the biggest show of power yet by a movement born on May 15 when a rally in Madrid’s central Puerta del Sol square sparked a worldwide campaign focused on anger over unemployment and opposition to the financial elite. This weekend, the global protest effort came as finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 industrialized nations meet in Paris to discuss economic issues, including ways to tackle Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. “I think it is very moving that the movement that was born here has extended throughout the world. It was about time for people to rise up,” 24-year-old Carmen Martin said as she marched toward Puerta del Sol. Only the beginning In Rome, which saw the worst violence of the day, the march quickly degenerated into running street battles between groups of hooded protesters and riot police who fired tear gas and water jets into the crowd. “Today is only the beginning. We hope to move forward with a global movement. There are many of us and we want the same things,” said Andrea Muraro, 24, an engineering student from Padua. “Only One Solution: Revolution!” read a placard. One group carried a cardboard coffin with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s name on it. Berlusconi later condemned the “incredible level of violence” at the march, which took place amid a security lockdown. The Vatican condemned an attack by protesters on the 18th century church of Santi Marcellino and Pietro near St. John Lateran Square, where much of Saturday’s violence occurred. “When I came down, I saw the entrance door had been smashed in,” the church’s parish priest, Fr. Giuseppe Ciucci, was quoted by Italian media as saying. “The Virgin Mary’s statue which was at the entrance had been taken away and I saw it had been thrown into the street and smashed,” he said. Tens of thousands of protesters assembled in Madrid on Saturday evening, when chants mingled with live music, including a rendition of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” lending the downtown area an upbeat feel on an unusually balmy fall afternoon. ‘Culmination of dream’ VIOLENT TURN Protesters attack a police vehicle during a demonstration in Rome. Others set fire to a government office. AFP Brief clashes were reported in London, where the police were out in force with dozens of riot vans, canine units and hundreds of officers. But the gathering, attended by people of all ages, was largely peaceful, with a picnic atmosphere and people streaming in and out of a nearby Starbucks. WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, made an appearance when a crowd assembled in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral. To loud cheers, Assange called the protest movement “the culmination of a dream.” Around 250 protesters set up camp outside St. Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of London on Sunday, promising to occupy the site indefinitely to show their anger at bankers and politicians over the global economic crisis. In the Portuguese capital, where some 50,000 rallied, Mathieu Rego, 25, said: “We are victims of financial speculation and this austerity program is going to ruin us. We have to change this rotten system.” The European Union also became a target for anger as the eurozone debt crisis continues, with some 9,000 protesters marching to its headquarters in Brussels and rallying outside the European Central Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt. Unfolding revolution More than 10,000 Canadians blew bubbles, strummed guitars and chanted anticorporate slogans at peaceful protests in cities across the country. VENDETTA MASKS Inspired by the film “V for Vendetta,” protesters wear masks in Barcelona, Spain. AFP “I believe a revolution is happening,” said 30-year-old Annabell Chapa, who brought her year-old son Jaydn along in a stroller to Toronto’s Saint James Park. In Mexico, Peru and Chile, thousands marched to protest what they slammed as an unfair financial system and stagnant unemployment. As the day began, around 500 people gathered in the heart of Hong Kong’s financial district to vent their anger. About 100 demonstrators in Tokyo also voiced fury at the Fukushima nuclear accident. Another 600 demonstrators in Sydney set up camp outside Australia’s central bank, where the plight of refugees and Aboriginal Australians was added to the financial concerns. With reports from New York Times News Service and Reuters Complete stories on our Digital Edition newsstand for tablets, netbooks and mobile phones. About to step out? Get breaking alerts on your mobile phone. Text ON INQ BREAKING to 4467, for Globe, Smart and Sun subscribers in the Philippines. Widening rich-poor gap stokes protests Agence France-Presse, Associated Press 1:31 am | Monday, October 17th, 2011 Libya and Imperialism By Sara Flounders Global Research, February 24, 2011 workers.org Of all the struggles going on in North Africa and the Middle East right now, the most difficult to unravel is the one in Libya. What is the character of the opposition to the Gadhafi regime, which reportedly now controls the eastern city of Benghazi? Is it just coincidence that the rebellion started in Benghazi, which is north of Libya’s richest oil fields as well as close to most of its oil and gas pipelines, refineries and its LNG port? Is there a plan to partition the country? What is the risk of imperialist military intervention, which poses the gravest danger for the people of the entire region? Libya is not like Egypt. Its leader, Moammar al-Gadhafi, has not been an imperialist puppet like Hosni Mubarak. For many years, Gadhafi was allied to countries and movements fighting imperialism. On taking power in 1969 through a military coup, he nationalized Libya’s oil and used much of that money to develop the Libyan economy. Conditions of life improved dramatically for the people. For that, the imperialists were determined to grind Libya down. The U.S. actually launched air strikes on Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986 that killed 60 people, including Gadhafi’s infant daughter – which is rarely mentioned by the corporate media. Devastating sanctions were imposed by both the U.S. and the U.N. to wreck the Libyan economy. After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 and leveled much of Baghdad with a bombing campaign that the Pentagon exultantly called “shock and awe,” Gadhafi tried to ward off further threatened aggression on Libya by making big political and economic concessions to the imperialists. He opened the economy to foreign banks and corporations; he agreed to IMF demands for “structural adjustment,” privatizing many state-owned enterprises and cutting state subsidies on necessities like food and fuel. The Libyan people are suffering from the same high prices and unemployment that underlie the rebellions elsewhere and that flow from the worldwide capitalist economic crisis. There can be no doubt that the struggle sweeping the Arab world for political freedom and economic justice has also struck a chord in Libya. There can be no doubt that discontent with the Gadhafi regime is motivating a significant section of the population. However, it is important for progressives to know that many of the people being promoted in the West as leaders of the opposition are long-time agents of imperialism. The BBC on Feb. 22 showed footage of crowds in Benghazi pulling down the green flag of the republic and replacing it with the flag of the overthrown monarch King Idris – who had been a puppet of U.S. and British imperialism. The Western media are basing a great deal of their reporting on supposed facts provided by the exile group National Front for the Salvation of Libya, which was trained and financed by the U.S. CIA. Google the front’s name plus CIA and you will find hundreds of references. The Wall Street Journal in a Feb. 23 editorial wrote that “The U.S. and Europe should help Libyans overthrow the Gadhafi regime.” There is no talk in the board rooms or the corridors of Washington about intervening to help the people of Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or Bahrain overthrow their dictatorial rulers. Even with all the lip service being paid to the mass struggles rocking the region right now, that would be unthinkable. As for Egypt and Tunisia, the imperialists are pulling every string they can to get the masses off the streets. There was no talk of U.S. intervention to help the Palestinian people of Gaza when thousands died from being blockaded, bombed and invaded by Israel. Just the opposite. The U.S. intervened to prevent condemnation of the Zionist settler state. Imperialism’s interest in Libya is not hard to find. Bloomberg.com wrote on Feb. 22 that while Libya is Africa’s third-largest producer of oil, it has the continent’s largest proven reserves – 44.3 billion barrels. It is a country with a relatively small population but the potential to produce huge profits for the giant oil companies. That’s how the super-rich look at it, and that’s what underlies their professed concern for the people’s democratic rights in Libya. Getting concessions out of Gadhafi is not enough for the imperialist oil barons. They want a government that they can own outright, lock, stock and barrel. They have never forgiven Gadhafi for overthrowing the monarchy and nationalizing the oil. Fidel Castro of Cuba in his column “Reflections” takes note of imperialism’s hunger for oil and warns that the U.S. is laying the basis for military intervention in Libya. In the U.S., some forces are trying to mobilize a street-level campaign promoting such U.S. intervention. We should oppose this outright and remind any well-intentioned people of the millions killed and displaced by U.S. intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Progressive people are in sympathy with what they see as a popular movement in Libya. We can help such a movement most by supporting its just demands while rejecting imperialist intervention, in whatever form it may take. It is the people of Libya who must decide their future. "If you're growing, you're not in recession … right?" The speaker is Hank Paulson, the former US treasury secretary, and, as it happens, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. In Charles Ferguson's documentaryabout the great financial crash, Paulson's shrugging remark sums up the attitude of the super-rich banking apparatchiks and their eager political supporters. As long as the bubble's getting bigger, there's no worry about the bubble contracting … right? But that is not what happens to bubbles. In 2008, the pop was heard around the world.
The good times rolled. The banks ballooned. They offered their traders mind-blowing bonuses to encourage risk-taking chutzpah, corporate loyalty, and a neurotically driven pursuit of profit. Ferguson argues that crucially, the banks were allowed to insure against bad debts with credit default swaps – any number of these insurance policies could be purchased against one particular risk. Chillingly, the banks now had a vested interest in selling insanely risky products, as they themselves were lavishly insured with these swaps. Perhaps the most sensational aspect of this film is Ferguson's contention that the crash corrupted the discipline of economics itself. Distinguished economists from America's Ivy League universities were drafted in by banks to compose reports sycophantically supporting reckless deregulation. They were massively paid for these consultancies. The banks bought the prestige of the academics, and their universities' prestige, too. Ferguson speaks to many of these economists, who clearly thought they were going to be interviewed as wry, dispassionate observers. It is really something to see the expression of shock, outrage and fear on their faces as they realise they're in the dock. One splutters with vexation; another gives vent to a ripe Freudian slip. Asked by Ferguson if he has any regrets about his behaviour, he says: "I have no comments … uh, no regrets." This is what Ferguson means by "inside job". There is a revolving door between the banks and the higher reaches of government, and to some extent the groves of academe. Bank CEOs become government officials, creating laws convenient for their once and future employers. Perhaps only the pen of Tom Wolfe could do justice to these harassed, bald, middle-aged masters of the universe, as they appear in Ferguson's film. The director shows how their body-language is always the same: somehow more guilty-looking when they are in the White House rose garden in their career pomp, being introduced to the press, than when they are facing openly hostile Senate hearings. They look uneasy, shifty, in weirdly ill-fitting suits, as if they are oppressed by the scrutiny, and worn out, possibly, by the strain of suppressing their own scruples. Their financial capacity far outstrips their capacity for enjoying themselves. They look very unhappy. Occasionally, British figures including Mervyn King and Alistair Darling are to be glimpsed in these photos, reminding us that we Brits have been ardent deregulators, as well. One of Ferguson's interviewees is Charles Morris, author of The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown, who amusingly discusses the effects this mega-windfall has on the individual banker's mind. He became absurdly rich and "he thought it was because he was smart". I was reminded of Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker, his very funny book about the financial mentality of the 80s boom. He noted that if a regular person won the lottery, he might roll around on the floor, kicking his legs up with glee, but when bankers won their arbitrary lottery, they instead became solemn, pompous, overwhelmed with their own importance and stateliness. Their recklessness and excess coexisted with an almost priestly sense of worth. Even more than rich lawyers, rich bankers felt that their money proved their superior cleverness and also moral worthiness as the generators of prosperity. Yet that prosperity didn't trickle down very far. Generally, this is the sort of film that is praised because it is not as wacky and tricksy as Michael Moore. Yet it is clearly influenced by him – it's like a Moore film with the gags and stunts removed. And it's worth noting that without Moore's pioneering work, this documentary could not have been made. Once again, the phrase that comes to mind is Milton Friedman's: socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the rest. An ordinary person defaults on his debt, he gets to live in his car. A banker defaults, and the taxpayer can be relied on to bail him out. No wonder the bonuses are back. But what can be done about all this? Ferguson has no answers, other than a faintly unedifying hint that bankers could be brought low if rumours about their systemic addiction to drugs and prostitutes could be made to stick legally – like Al Capone's tax evasion. But only a new political mood for regulation will do, and this still seems far away. Global Military Agenda: Increased US-NATO Military Presence in Southeast Asia. Completing Plans For Asian NATO By Rick Rozoff Global Research, October 22, 2010Stop NATO The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=21562 In keeping with the global trend manifested in other strategically vital areas of the world, the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - a consortium of all major Western military (including nuclear) powers and former colonial empires - are increasing their military presence in Southeast Asia with special emphasis on the geopolitically critical Strait of Malacca. The latter is one of the world's most important shipping lanes and major strategic chokepoints. In an opinion piece The Times of London granted to George Robertson and Paddy Ashdown - the first a former NATO secretary general and current Baron Robertson of Port Ellen, the other a past intelligence officer and the West's viceroy in Bosnia at the beginning of the decade who nearly reprised the role in Afghanistan two years ago - in June of 2008 which in part rued the fact that "For the first time in more than 200 years we are moving into a world not wholly dominated by the West." [1] In fact for the first time in half a millennium the founding members of NATO in Europe and North America are confronted with a planet not largely or entirely under their control. With the elimination of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its network of allies around the world a generation ago, the prospect of the West reestablishing uncontested worldwide domination appeared a more viable option than it had at any time since the First World War. Much as the British Empire had done earlier in positioning its navy and its military outposts overlooking maritime access points to monitor and control vital shipping lanes and to block adversaries' transit of military personnel and materiel, the West now collectively envisions regaining lost advantages and gaining new ones in areas of the world previously inaccessible to its military penetration. Southeast Asia is one such case. Divided during the colonial epoch between Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain (with the U.S. supplanting the last-named in the Philippines in 1898), it has a combined population of approximately 600 million, two-thirds that of the Western Hemisphere and almost three-quarters that of Europe. The Strait of Malacca runs for 600 miles between Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore to the east and the Indonesian island of Sumatra to the west. According to the United Nations International Maritime Organization, at least 50,000 ships pass through the strait annually, transporting 30 percent of the goods traded in the world including oil from the Persian Gulf to major East Asian nations like China, Japan and South Korea. As many as 20 million barrels of oil a day pass through the Strait of Malacca, an amount that will only increase with the further advance of the Asian Century. When the U.S. went to war against Iraq in 1991, notwithstanding claims concerning Kuwait's territorial integrity and fictitious accusations of infants being torn from incubators in the country's capital, one of the major objectives was to demonstrate to a new unipolar world that Washington had its hand on the global oil spigot. That it controlled the flow of Persian Gulf oil north and west to Europe and east to Asia, especially to the four nations that import the most oil next to the United States: Japan, China, South Korea and India. The first three receive Persian Gulf oil primarily by tankers passing through the Strait of Malacca. The U.S. Department of Energy has provided a comprehensive yet concise blueprint for the Pentagon to act on: "Chokepoints are narrow channels along widely used global sea routes. They are a critical part of global energy security due to the high volume of oil traded through their narrow straits. The Strait of Hormuz leading out of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Malacca linking the Indian and Pacific Oceans are two of the world’s most strategic chokepoints. Other important passages include: Bab el-Mandab which connects the Arabian Sea with the Red Sea; the Panama Canal and the Panama Pipeline connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans; the Suez Canal and the Sumed Pipeline linking the Red Sea and Mediterranean Sea; and the Turkish/Bosporus Straits joining the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea region to the Mediterranean Sea." [2] The U.S. has moved its military into the Black Sea and Central Asia as well as into the Persian Gulf, and two years ago the Pentagon inaugurated U.S. Africa Command primarily to secure oil supplies and transport in Africa's Gulf of Guinea and in the Horn of Africa. The Strait of Malacca is the main channel connecting the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. On its southeastern end it flows into the South China Sea where the natural resource-rich Paracel and Spratly island groups are contested between China on the one hand and several members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on the other. The Spratly Islands are claimed in part by ASEAN member states Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam as well as Taiwan. The Paracel Islands were seized by China in a naval battle with South Vietnam in 1974. The U.S. deployed the USS George Washington nuclear-powered supercarrier and the USS John S. McCain destroyer to the South China Sea in August for the first joint military exercise ever conducted by the U.S. and (unified) Vietnam, three weeks after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said while attending the ASEAN foreign ministers' meeting in the Vietnamese capital that "The United States...has a national interest in freedom of navigation, open access to Asia's maritime commons, and respect for international law in the South China Sea," adding "The United States is a Pacific nation, and we are committed to being an active partner with ASEAN." Clinton's trip to Hanoi was preceded by visits to the capitals of Pakistan, Afghanistan and South Korea, all three Asian nations solidly in the U.S. military orbit. While in the last country she traveled to the Demilitarized Zone separating South from North Korea with Pentagon chief Robert Gates, in the first such joint visit by U.S. Secretaries of State and Defense, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War (which led to war with China within three months). Four days after Clinton left Seoul the U.S. launched the Invincible Spirit joint war games in the East Sea/Sea of Japan with South Korea, the following month the latest of annual Ulchi Freedom Guardian military exercises with 30,000 American and 56,000 South Korean troops, and in September anti-submarine drills in the Yellow Sea. [3] Reflecting on Clinton's statements at July's ASEAN summit, Malaysian-based journalist and analyst Kazi Mahmoud wrote: "Washington is using the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) regional group for a bigger military purpose and this strategy is becoming clear to observers due to the U.S. push for greater influence in Asia. By reaching out to nations like Vietnam, Laos and even Myanmar (Burma) as it has lately - ASEAN consists of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam - "The United States is fomenting a long-term strategy to contain both China and Russia in Southeast Asia....Before the Afghan war, the Americans could count on Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia along with Brunei in the region. Today the U.S. has Vietnam and Cambodia on its side." (In July U.S. Pacific Command and U.S. Army Pacific led the Angkor Sentinel 2010 multinational exercises in Cambodia.) Furthermore, Washington's recruitment of ASEAN nations, initially over territorial disputes with China, will lead to "turn[ing] ASEAN into a...military corps to fight for American causes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and surely Georgia and North Korea....Once the U.S. has achieved such goals, it will control the Malacca Straits and the seaways of the region." [4] Non-ASEAN nations Taiwan, with which the U.S. formalized a $6.4 billion arms deal earlier this year [5], is involved in a Spratly Islands territorial dispute with China and Japan is at loggerheads with China over what it calls the Senkaku Islands and China the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. On October 11 U.S. Defense Secretary Gates met with Japanese Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa at the ASEAN defense ministers' meeting in Hanoi, and the "defense chiefs agreed in their talks...that their countries will jointly respond in line with a bilateral security pact toward stability in areas in the East China Sea covering the Senkaku Islands that came into the spotlight in disputes between Japan and China...." [6] The pact in question is the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the United States signed in 1960, comparable to mutual military assistance arrangements the Pentagon has with Australia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand in the Asia-Pacific region. "It is also developing a strong strategic relationship with Vietnam, of all places. It is also working hard on Indonesia and Malaysia, both of which have indicated they want to get closer to Washington." [7] During the Shangri-La Dialogue defense ministers' meeting in Singapore this June Gates stated: "My government's overriding obligation to allies, partners and the region is to reaffirm America's security commitments in the region." [8] Singapore and, since July, Malaysia are official Troop Contributing Countries for NATO's war in Afghanistan. In June Malaysia and Thailand joined this year's version of the annual U.S.-led Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) naval exercises, the largest in the world (with 20,000 troops, 34 ships, five submarines and over 100 aircraft this year), hosted by the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. RIMPAC 2010 marked the two Southeast Asian nations' first participation in the war games. Other nations involved were the U.S., Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Peru, Singapore and South Korea. In addition to occupying Afghanistan with 152,000 U.S. and NATO troops, building an Afghan army and air force under the West's command, and integrating Pakistan in joint commissions with the U.S. and NATO [9], Washington is also consolidating a strategic military partnership with India. Last October the U.S. Army participated in the latest and largest of Yudh Abhyas (training for war) war games held since 2004 with its Indian counterpart. Exercise Yudh Abhyas 2009 featured 1,000 troops, the U.S.’s Javelin anti-tank missile system and the first deployment of American Stryker armored combat vehicles outside the Afghan and Iraqi war theaters. [10] The U.S. has also been holding annual naval exercises codenamed Malabar with the world's second most populous country and in the past four years has broadened them into a multinational format with the inclusion of Canada, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Malabar 2007 was conducted in the Bay of Bengal, immediately north of the Strait of Malacca, and included 25 warships from five nations: The U.S., India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. This September 28 India and Japan held their first army-to-army talks in New Delhi which "aimed at reviewing the present status of engagements, military cooperation and military security issues...." Japan thus became the ninth country with which the Indian Army has a bilateral dialogue, joining the U.S., Britain, France, Australia, Bangladesh, Israel, Malaysia and Singapore. At the same time the Indian Chief of Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Pradeep Naik, was on a "three-day goodwill visit" to Japan to meet with his Japanese counterpart, Air Self-Defense Force chief of staff General Kenichiro Hokazono. [11] On October 14 the Pentagon launched the latest bilateral Amphibious Landing Exercise (PHIBLEX) and Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) in the Philippines, with over 3,000 U.S. troops and six ships and aircraft involved. If a recurrence of the 1974 Battle of the Paracel Islands or the 1988 Chinese-Vietnamese clash over the Spratly Islands erupts between China and other claimants, the U.S. is poised to intervene. On October 13 South Korea for the first time hosted an exercise of the U.S.-formed Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) naval interdiction operation, launched by President George W. Bush in 2003 with initial emphasis on Asia but which in the interim has assumed a global scope. [12] To end on October 22, it involves the participation of 14 nations including the U.S., Canada, France, Australia and Japan, which are contributing a guided missile destroyer, maritime patrol planes and anti-submarine helicopters. Six years ago Admiral Thomas Fargo, at the time head of U.S. Pacific Command, promoted a Regional Maritime Security Initiative which was described as "grow[ing] out of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI)” and designed to "deploy US marines with high-speed boats to guard the Malacca Straits...." [13] Both Indonesia and Malaysia objected to the plan to station American military forces off their coasts. In January of 2009 NATO announced plans for the Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 (SNMG1), part of the NATO Response Force of up to 25,000 troops designed for global missions, to engage in "a six-month deployment to the Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean" and to travel "through areas such as the Strait of Malacca, Java and the South China sea, an area of the world that is not frequented by NATO fleets." [14] The Indian Ocean, which the Pentagon divides between its Central Command, Africa Command and Pacific Command, is now also being patrolled by NATO warships. [15] The SNMG1, which was the first NATO naval group to circumnavigate the African continent two years before, was diverted to the Gulf of Aden for NATO's Operation Allied Provider begun in April of 2009 and succeeded in August with the still active Operation Ocean Shield. Also last April, the NATO naval group, with warships from Canada, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, arrived in Karachi, Pakistan "to conduct a two-day joint naval exercise with the Pakistan Navy in the North Arabian Sea" [16] en route to Singapore. According to the Alliance, "The deployment of warships in South East Asia demonstrates the high value NATO places on its relationship with other partners across the globe...." [17] Just as the U.S. has reactivated Cold War-era military alliances in the Asia-Pacific region in the first decade of this century, [18] so have its main NATO allies. Shortly after Washington deployed the USS Abraham Lincoln nuclear-powered supercarrier with "F/A-18C Hornet, F/A-18E/F super Hornet, C-2A Greyhound, MH-60R Seahawk and MH-60S Seahawk helicopters and other fighter jets" [19] to the Port Klang Cruise Centre in Malaysia this month, the defense ministers of the United Kingdom-initiated Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) collective - whose members are Britain, Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore - met in the capital of Singapore for the 13th FPDA Defence Chiefs’ Conference. "The Defence Chiefs...issued the FPDA Exercise Concept Directive during the conference. "The directive aims to guide the development of future FPDA exercises and activities to strengthen interoperability and interactions between the armed forces of the five member countries. "It also aims to further enhance the FPDA’s capacity in conducting conventional and non-conventional operations...." [20] The five defense chiefs then left Singapore to attend the opening ceremony of Exercise Bersama Padu 2010 at the Butterworth Airbase in the Malaysian state of Penang on October 15. The military exercise continues to October 29 and includes "13 ships and 63 aircraft from the five FPDA countries working together in a multi-threat environment." [21] The FPDA was set up in 1971, at the height of the Cold War, and along with similar military groups - NATO most prominently - has not only continued but expanded in the post-Cold War period. According to the Australian Department of Defence, Bersama Padu 2010, "is a three-week exercise [commenced on October 11] designed to enhance regional security in the area. "The exercise, which is part of the Five Power Defence Arrangement (FPDA), will take place at various locations across the Malaysian Peninsula as well as the South China Sea." It includes four Australian warships and eight F/A-18 multirole fighter jets. Australian Lieutenant General Mark Evans, Chief of Joint Operations, said "the FPDA countries shared a common interest in the security and stability of the region, and the exercise would enhance the interoperability of the combined air, ground and naval forces of member nations." [22] All five FPDA members are engaged in NATO's war in Afghanistan as part of a historically unprecedented exercise in warfighting interoperability with some 45 other nations. Britain has the second largest amount of troops assigned to NATO's International Security Assistance Force, an estimated 9,500, and Australia the most of any non-NATO member state, 1,550. [23] Afghanistan is the training ground for a global expeditionary NATO. And for a rapidly emerging Asian NATO, one which is being prepared to confront China in the South China Sea and elsewhere. Notes 1) The Times, June 12, 2008 2) U.S. Energy Information Administration http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/world_oil_transit_chokepoints/background.html 3) U.S.-China Conflict: From War Of Words To Talk Of War, Part I Stop NATO, August 15, 2010 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/08/15/u-s-china-conflict-from-war-of-words-to-talk-of-war-part-i Part II: U.S.-China Crisis: Beyond Words To Confrontation Stop NATO, August 17, 2010 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/part-ii-u-s-china-crisis-beyond-words-toward-confrontation 4) Kazi Mahmood, U.S. Using ASEAN To Weaken China World Future Online, August 13, 2010 5) U.S.-China Military Tensions Grow Stop NATO, January 19, 2010 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/u-s-china-military-tensions-grow 6) Kyodo News, October 11, 2010 7) The Australian, August 19, 2010 8) Ibid 9) NATO Pulls Pakistan Into Its Global Network Stop NATO, July 23, 2010 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/nato-pulls-pakistan-into-its-global-network 10) India: U.S. Completes Global Military Structure Stop NATO, September 10, 2010 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/india-u-s-completes-global-military-structure 11) The Hindu, September 29, 2010 12) Proliferation Security Initiative And U.S. 1,000-Ship Navy: Control Of World’s Oceans, Prelude To War Stop NATO, January 29, 2009 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/proliferation-security-initiative-and-us-1000-ship-navy-control-of-worlds-oceans-prelude-to-war 13) Financial Times, April 5, 2004 14) Victoria News, January 30, 2009 15) U.S., NATO Expand Afghan War To Horn Of Africa And Indian Ocean Stop NATO, January 8, 2010 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/u-s-nato-expand-afghan-war-to-horn-of-africa-and-indian-ocean-2 16) The News International, April 27, 2009 17) Indo-Asian News Service, March 26, 2009 18) Asia: Pentagon Revives And Expands Cold War Military Blocs Stop NATO, September 14, 2010 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/asia-pentagon-revives-and-expands-cold-war-military-blocs U.S. Marshals Military Might To Challenge Asian Century Stop NATO, August 21, 2010 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/u-s-marshals-military-might-to-challenge-asian-century 19) Bernama, October 8, 2010 20) Government of Singapore, October 14, 2010 21) Ibid 22) Australian Government Department of Defence October 11, 2010 23) Afghan War: NATO Builds History’s First Global Army Stop NATO, August 9, 2009 http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/afghan-war-nato-builds-historys-first-global-army For general distribution Geological Hazards of the Bataan Nuclear Plant: Propaganda and Scientific Fact Kelvin S. Rodolfo Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Earth & Environmental Sciences, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago [email protected] Corresponding Member, National Academy of Science and Technology 20 July 2010 Introduction The activation of the Bataan plant poses the greatest threat to the well-being of the Filipino people and their environment in my quarter century of natural-hazard scientific experience. And the natural dangers are being greatly compounded by nuclear proponents of great influence who know little geology. They select “facts” that defend the safety of the plant site, and ignore “inconvenient” scientific truths that are easily available and verifiable. This is not only dismissive of the dangers to the people, it is a great disrespect and disdain for natural-hazard science. Foremost among these BNPP advocates is Congressman Marcos Cojuangco, the author of the House bill “Mandating the Immediate Rehabilitation, Commissioning, and Commercial Operation of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant”. His Explanatory Note for the bill displays a glaring lack of information about the geological hazards. He knew so little about volcanoes that in his Bill he located Natib volcano “ten kilometers (10 km) from the BNPP”. Mt. Natib constitutes more than the entire northern half of the Bataan Peninsula (Figure 1). Its base is below sea level. The BNPP site is on the flank of the volcano, at Napot Point. Like Mt. Pinatubo, this volcano is “calderagenic”, meaning that its eruptions are characteristically widely separated in time, but very violent, and leave a large caldera or depression at its summit. Natib has two calderas; one elongated in the north-south direction, 7.5 kilometers long by 5 kilometers wide. It has a second, circular caldera, 2 kilometers in diameter, about the same size as the one produced at the Pinatubo summit during its 1991 eruption. If caldera size is a measure of eruption power, the one that produced the large Natib caldera was much stronger than Pinatubo 1991. Mr. Cojuangco and his allies often extol the safety of the plant by saying that it withstood the 1990 Luzon quake and the 1991 Pinatubo eruption. Shaking an operating megawatt nuclear plant is entirely another matter. The BNPP sits on the coast, because to operate it would require great volumes of seawater flowing through it to cool not only the reactor, but also the spent fuel rods. 2 Spent fuel pools Mr. Cojuangco and his allies should augment their biased, pro-nuclear reading with a 2003 article by Robert Alvarez and others: “Reducing the hazards from stored spent powerreactor fuel in the United States”1. FIGURE 1. The Bataan peninsula is entirely composed of two large volcanoes. More than half, its northern part, is Mt. Natib; the southern portion is Mt. Mariveles. Mt. Natib has two “calderas” or large depressions at its summit. The older one is 5 x 7 kilometers in size and drains westward into Subic Bay. The younger one is smaller and circular, 2 kilometers in diameter, similar in size to the one formed on Pinatubo during its 1991 eruption. Another “must read” by conscientious proponents, and anyone who simply wants to know the scientific facts, is the June 25, 2005 Council on Foreign Relations discussion, “Are Nuclear Spent Fuel Pools Secure?2. Quoting that report: “Nuclear fuel becomes spent, or used, after it has been in a reactor for between about 4.5 and 6 years. The fuel is not actually exhausted at this point, but is no longer an economically viable heat source. Every 18 to 24 months about a third of the fuel of an operating commercial nuclear reactor is removed. The fuel is highly radioactive and continues to produce a large amount of heat through radioactive decay, called ‘decay heat,’ after its removal.” The spent fuel rods must be kept immersed in a pool of water, typically 40 by 40 feet in area and 40 feet deep, in which the radiation from the rods is absorbed and transformed into heat. Millions of gallons of water must flow through the plant every day not only to cool the reactor core, but also the spent-fuel pool. Even if an eruption was predicted in time to 3 shut the reactor down, it would not be possible to evacuate the spent fuel rods. Interruption of that water supply could be catastrophic. A disruption would not be very difficult: Failure of a pump or valve, rupture of a pipe, an inattentive or sleepy technician, an electrical brownout or power surge… Not much of a task for an even moderate earthquake, let alone an eruption. Taiwan scientists Chang- Hwa Chen and J.J.-S. Shen have pointed out that undersea volcanic eruptions generate large quantities of floating pumice that could easily clog the seawater intakes of nuclear plants3. Huge quantities of low-density pumice fell on Zambales, Bataan and Subic Bay during the 1991 Pinatubo eruption, and we are very fortunate that the BNPP was not operating. The spent fuel rods are armored with a zirconium alloy. If the pool water were lost, the armor of the newest spent-fuel assembly would ignite, and in turn could ignite adjacent fuel assemblies. Once started, the fire would be virtually impossible to put out. Spraying it with water would only make it worse, because even more heat is generated when zirconium reacts with steam. A fire and explosion in the spent fuel storage pool could release huge volumes of radioactive gases to the atmosphere, including much radioactive cesium-137, which is water-soluble and extremely toxic in minute amounts. An aside: As a Zambaleňo and friend of Olongapo and the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority, I am concerned about the impact of millions of gallons of seawater heated and released every day, on Subic Bay and adjacent coastal environments and ecosystems should BNPP be operated. Does an Environmental Impact Statement for BNPP include an evaluation of such questions? Propaganda Mr. Cojuangco must have learned a few things from the seminars on nuclear power he attended early this year at the National Institute of Geological Sciences. He no longer repeats some of his many naïve but widely proclaimed ideas, for example, that the BNPP is more than ten kilometers away from Mt. Natib. But the Congressman is bound and determined that the plant must be refurbished and operated, come what may, so it is left to others to declare the safety of the site. Most of these nuclear apologists, including prominent media commentators and government figures, clearly know no more geology than the congressman does, and repeat many of his naive statements, including some that he has abandoned. For example: his mistaken notion that the farthest a volcanic mass can travel is six times the elevation of the volcano, repeated recently by Prof. Solita Monsod on GMA Ch7. Geologists will recognize this as a misuse of a ratio that they use to estimate how far a landslide can travel. During an eruption, pyroclastic flows --- dense mixtures of explosion debris and very hot gases -- can surge great distances down the volcano flanks at hurricane speeds, searing and obliterating everything in their paths. These are not landslides! 4 We have documented4 one such prehistoric pyroclastic flow from Mt. Natib that entered Subic Bay sometime between 11,000 and 18,000 years ago. Contrary to Mr. Cojuangco’s misreading of our research, that event can by no means be assumed to have occurred during Natib’s latest eruption. Some history A much more thoughtful Congressman, Hon. Roilo Golez, has cautioned that the risks are magnified by a national lack of a “culture of safety that is observed in Japan, the United States and Western Europe”. The BNPP has been cursed with that lack from the very beginning. It continues to this day. Cojuangco’s casual dismissal of the geohazards at Napot Point carries on the hurried carelessness exercised by the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who decided to build nuclear reactors in 1973 and forced the construction to begin in 1976, even before the natural hazards had been properly assessed. That task should have taken at least five years, but dictators are not patient. That task remains unfinished to this day. The Hernandez-Santos 1977 report On 12 January 1977, after the BNPP construction had already started, Nuclear Technologist III Elmer C. Hernandez and Senior Nuclear Technologist Gabriel Santos, Jr. submitted an 8-page internal report on the geohazards at the BNPP site5. Hernandez and Santos were true heroes, their concern for the well-being of the public outweighing the risk of dictatorial displeasure Excerpts from that report are alarming: “1. The proposed site … is very near the Manila Trench – Luzon Trough tectonic structures. “2. The proposed site is literally bracketed by significant and very strong (high magnitude) historical earthquakes…within a 100 kilometer radius. In fact…one … occurred (1970) within 1-2 km of the proposed site itself in Napot Point. “3. The probability of an epicenter of an earthquake occurring at the site is unacceptably very high. Covering a span of 74 years, 49 significant earthquakes occurred in the above area, one of which one occurred within 1-2 kilometers of the proposed site itself.…” “4. Known significant and major earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 8 were apparently overlooked and not considered in the computation of the shutdown earthquake design basis... “5. Earth satellite data… suggest the presence of a lineament in the site itself. Ground magnetometer data… appear to substantiate the existence of a probable fault at the proposed plant location.” 5 Hernandez and Santos concluded: “… The above review has revealed the high risk potential for the protection of health and safety of the public if the proposed site is accepted. High probability earth motions associated with earthquakes due to the Manila Trench – West Luzon Trough displacements and presence of a probable fault in the plant location itself may lend to structural failures causing the release of radioactive materials from the nuclear power plant or may cause extensive damage to the plant.” But Marcos was not to be denied, and the construction continued. The 1979 Sonido report Nevertheless, the Philippine Atomic Energy Commission must have been concerned enough to ask Prof. Ernesto Sonido, the geophysicist of the UP-Diliman Department of Geology and Geography, to investigate the site further. On 25 January 1979 he submitted his report to PAEC6. Apparently, NPC had cut trenches through a postulated fault and reported no evidence of faulting in them “without considering the difficulty of detecting faults in thick overburden and easily ‘healable’ rocks exposed in the trenches.” Dr. Sonido mentioned numerous mistakes by NPC, including a 90° error in the given direction of a trench. He also remarked several times that much field information had already been destroyed or obscured by the ongoing construction. Nevertheless, Dr. Sonido and Mr. John Palmer, the groundwater consultant of the contractor firm Ebasco, agreed on site that “the postulated fault is a fault zone with a width equal to the width of [a] river [south of Napot Point?] and that the existing river is along the fault...“ Numerous seepages along fractures in otherwise impermeable rocks, and variable depths of a ‘tuff’ horizon in more than 30 boreholes at the plant site “…suggest that the area had been tectonically active…”. The Post-Chernobyl Government Studies of the BNPP After the Aquino administration mothballed the nuclear plant following the Chernobyl disaster, the Presidential Committee on the Philippine Nuclear Power Plant (PCPNPP) commissioned NUS Corporation, a U.S. nuclear consultancy firm, to manage a technical audit of the BNPP. NUS assembled a multidisciplinary team of over 15 nuclear experts from the US, Germany, Brazil, South Korea and Japan to evaluate the field implementation of the plant design, quality assurance and control, and construction practices. A technical audit of the BNPP was also commissioned by a Senate Ad-Hoc Committee on the BNPP. From 1988 to 1990 over 50 nuclear experts from the US and Europe made a much more extensive audit that cost the government $10 million. The study was kept confidential because of the pending litigation vs Westinghouse, who constructed the plant. Its many volumes remain locked up in the Senate vaults. 6 According to Nicanor Perlas, who was a technical consultant for both studies, the experts concluded that the project’s Quality Assurance Program was sloppy and below regulatory standards7. Thus, it was impossible to determine if the strict specifications for constructing a nuclear plant were met. Perlas says that the studies should be made fully available to the public to save much unnecessary and expensive duplication. After all, the Filipino taxpayers paid for them, and are entitled to their full perusal and proper use. But it now turns out, mysteriously, that neither the Senate nor Malacaňang can find the voluminous reports of these studies8. The 1986 Fortune Magazine article Fortunately, many of the details in those missing reports should contain were published by Fortune Magazine in 19869, while memories of the the BNPP project were still fresh. Anyone who wishes to comment on the safety of the BNPP owes it to the public to read it. The article relates in horrifying, sometimes amusing detail, the feeding frenzy of American companies and Marcos cronies alike, over the billions of dollars involved. It also tells how “… in March 1976, Westinghouse began clearing the site before Napocor had a construction permit from the Philippine Atomic Energy Commission”, and how Ebasco contractors “were still performing on-site tests to determine whether the site was safe. “... The work began so early that the bulldozers rumbling around the site interfered with the seismic tests… Librado Ibe, the Philippine regulator, says Westinghouse rushed into construction because National Power and Marcos wanted the plant built quickly.” Apologists now deny the numerous allegations of carelessness during construction. But the Fortune article also details serious quality issues that were raised by IAEA technicians. Please keep in mind spent-fuel pools and the large flow of cooling seawater they need, as you read this long excerpt: “Of the experts who were at the plant during construction, the most persuasive witness is William Albert, the IAEA adviser. Albert spent 18 years with the NRC and its predecessor, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, before retiring this year. NRC safety specialists describe him as one of the best inspectors the agency ever had. He spent 3 1/2 years in the Philippines -- from July 1979 to July 1981 and from October 1983 to March 1985. “Westinghouse itself recommended Albert to FORTUNE as a competent expert who paid close attention to what happened at the plant. Albert does not say the plant is hopelessly flawed. Indeed, he argues that Aquino should fix it and put it in operation. But he says it could conceivably cost hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. To know for sure, he says, would require a detailed inspection by a team of 40 to 50 specialists. 7 “One major problem Albert describes involves welds in a system of thousands of hangers for water pipes that snake throughout the plant. A badly welded hanger could allow a pipe to burst, causing a major accident or the failure of an essential safety system. The welders at the Philippine plant, Albert charges, broke many rules of the trade. “Welders use a metal called weld rod, which in humid Bataan must be kept dry because moisture can cause a seam to crack. To keep the rod dry, welders store it in a small, box-shaped electric oven that is supposed to be plugged in at all times. But the welders at the plant often played a game: They would see how long they could fool inspectors by keeping their ovens unplugged. Albert says the welders did not want to bother stringing extension cords to the ovens. “Albert adds that welders worked around the clock when Westinghouse sped up construction at the plant. He came upon one welder who had been on the job for 26 hours. ‘They let me get an hour of sleep now and then,’ the worker explained. Says Albert: ‘There's no way a welder can work for 26 hours straight and do quality work.’ “Westinghouse insists that it has checked all the welds and verified that they are fine. But that is difficult to prove since record keeping at the plant was sloppy. An inspector on the site found couplings in a cooling-tower fan that were grossly misaligned. When he checked the records, he found the paperwork for couplings that had been properly installed, but not for those that were bungled. Westinghouse concedes that quality was sometimes hard to monitor because reports were illegible. “Albert also criticizes the work on base plates that hold pipe hangers in place. Each hanger is attached to a metal plate, which in turn is bolted to the concrete walls, ceilings, or floors. Albert says many of these plates were installed so badly that they were not flush to the surface. Bolts holding the plates frequently did not grip the concrete and twisted continuously if turned. If plates broke away from the wall during an earthquake, Albert says, pipes could fly around the plant like loose fire hoses. “Some pipes are meant to move because they must flex as the pressure or temperature in them rises and falls. Albert says plates and hangers that are supposed to allow movement were sometimes badly aligned, preventing the pipes from shifting freely. In other instances plates designed to move were bolted fast to the floor. Albert pointed this out to Westinghouse, he says, ‘and they accepted it as is.’ “An IAEA team that inspected the plant in June 1984 noted that many valves controlling water flow were poorly marked or unmarked. Albert says the valves were still poorly marked in February 1985, after Westinghouse had pronounced the plant complete. He adds that workers blithely twisted valves with tags on them saying DO NOT OPERATE. A worker caught tampering with a valve in a U.S. nuclear plant would be fired. “During the rainy season, underground conduits and vaults carrying electrical cables between buildings fill with water. Westinghouse says the flooding was expected and is not a problem. The cables running between buildings, it says, are designed to operate under water. Another safety expert from the IAEA who was on the scene to advise the Philippine Atomic 8 Energy Commission disagrees. He is Lucian Vorderbrueggen, an electrical engineer who recently retired from his job as a senior safety inspector with the NRC. ‘Cable is not designed to be constantly submerged,’ he says, explaining that the insulation could eventually break down and the cable short-circuit, cutting off power to safety equipment. “Vorderbrueggen, who was at the plant until last September, says the underground vaults were badly built and leak constantly. To repair them properly, he says, would require major redesign and rebuilding. He adds that Westinghouse did nothing about the leaking in most of the vaults, but dealt with the problem in a couple of them by trying to seal them and putting in sump pumps, which he calls ‘a real Band-Aid fix.’ Says Vorderbrueggen: ‘In the U.S. (the NRC) would say, 'Fix it right or we won't license the plant.' ‘ “Albert attributes all these problems to a breakdown in quality control. Westinghouse had a quality control staff of 45 persons at peak construction. Albert estimates that its two principal subcontractors, Disini's Power Contractors Inc. and Miescor, a company controlled by a brother of Imelda Marcos, had 40 or more. National Power had 30, plus five Ebasco experts to advise them. And the Philippine Atomic Energy Commission had two inspectors who visited the site occasionally and eight advisers like Albert who were there under the aegis of the IAEA. “Why couldn't all those inspectors ensure that the work was done right? Witnesses disagree. Albert says Westinghouse had the final authority on how problems were resolved, and some of its inspectors would not take the necessary corrective action. ‘They couldn't have cared less,’ he says. Josue Polintan, the National Power senior vice president in charge of the plant, agrees that quality control was poor but says the Westinghouse inspectors were not to blame. ‘If the guys at Westinghouse found out about it,’ he says, ‘they would try to fix the problems, but their workers would try to cover up and Westinghouse couldn't possibly catch it all.’ “Albert claims that Westinghouse officials routinely took too little action in response to complaints from its subcontractors and National Power inspectors. He says much of the clout National Power had came through the Atomic Energy Commission, which had the final say about whether the plant was acceptable. As a result, National Power inspectors would sometimes ask the commission to intervene when Westinghouse did not heed complaints from the utility. But even that often failed. ‘If you got Westinghouse to say they would do something, usually something would be done,’ says Albert. ‘But whether it was satisfactory was another matter.’ “In 1979 Albert reported to Westinghouse that workers were not heating highcarbon- steel reinforcing rods in the concrete structure before welding them. Failure to heat the rods increases the risk that the welds will crack. Albert says Westinghouse agreed to teach the welders how to do the job right. When he returned to the site over four years later, however, they still weren't heating the rods. ‘The only difference,’ he says, ‘was that they knew better.’ “Westinghouse appears to have solved some deficiencies by rewriting specifications. Paul van Gemst, a Swedish engineer on loan to the IAEA from ASEA-ATOM, a company 9 that builds nuclear plants, says commission employees told him that was how Westinghouse cured the problems with the base plates for the pipe support brackets. ‘Westinghouse tried to recalculate the hangers and base plates to prove that they did meet specifications,’ says van Gemst. ‘When they failed to meet the specs, Westinghouse modified them.’ Westinghouse acknowledges that it changed specifications for base plates and hangers, but says design engineers certified that the new specs met design requirements. “In disputing the charges of construction flaws, Westinghouse relies heavily on reports made in February 1985 by an IAEA inspection team and the Philippine Atomic Energy Commission's technical staff. Westinghouse says both groups concluded that the plant ‘meets international safety standards followed by 26 nations’ and was ready for core loading. “The commission staff report does not provide the endorsement Westinghouse describes. The staff said that National Power and Westinghouse had all their paperwork in order, so the commission could begin considering the application for an operating license. The report added that several safety issues still had to be resolved before the nuclear fuel could be loaded. “The IAEA report that Westinghouse cites was a follow-up to a report by another IAEA team that found a morass of defects in June 1984. ‘In the past,’ the 1984 IAEA team said, ‘quality assurance in construction work showed major weaknesses, as was indicated by generic deficiencies, which went undetected for a long time, especially in respect of weldingrod control, cable pulling, and valve installations. The result was a deterioration in the work quality on-site.’ The 1985 report indicates that the problems had been solved and concludes that ‘there is no technical obstacle’ to loading fuel and running the plant. “How could two IAEA teams, both led by the agency's safety director, Morris Rosen, arrive at such different conclusions just eight months apart? For one thing, a construction expert on the 1984 team who was critical of the plant, William Ang of the NRC, was not on the 1985 team. Apart from an engineer who visited in 1984 and found some continuing problems with the electrical cables when he returned in 1985, the members of the second team were not construction experts. They specialized in such areas as training and radiation exposure. “Albert maintains, and other NRC safety experts agree, that the IAEA team could not possibly have done a thorough inspection in the week it spent at the plant. He also says that many problems cited by the 1984 team still existed a month after the 1985 team had left. Rosen refuses to say what the second team did to reexamine the problems reported by the 1984 team. ‘I won't comment on specifics,’ he says. ‘These are very technical. People involved at the plant say nothing was wrong with it’”. The Ruaya-Panem 1991 study of the large Natib caldera In the late 1980s, J. R. Ruaya and C. C. Panem of the Philippine National Oil Corporation published research conducted on numerous hot springs emanating from many faults within the large Mt. Natib caldera (Figure 2)10. Their geochemical research indicated a 10 subsurface heat source “greater than 200°C”. This is much more activity than Pinatubo exhibited before its world-class 1991 eruption. FIGURE 2. The summit calderas of Mt. Natib. Modified from Ruaya and Panem,199110. The 1992 Torres report While Dr. Ronnie Torres, a foremost pyroclastic-flow expert was still at Phivolcs, and before he left for the University of Hawaii, he warned of volcanism and faulting at the site, in a 1992 report.11 Quoting Dr. Torres: “Natib volcano does not erupt very often but could still erupt [emphasis mine].” The Sonido-Umbal 2000 Report to the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority Dr. Ernesto Sonido collaborated with Mr. Jesse Umbal in 2000 to submit a detailed analysis for SBMA of the geology and geohazards of the Subic Bay area.12 Jess Umbal is one of the brightest, most competent volcanologists and geologists I know. Working with me during the Pinatubo eruption, he earned his Masters degree at the University of Illinois in 11 1993. Dr. Sonido is not a volcanologist, so we can assume that Umbal wrote those aspects in the report, which adjudged Natib as “potentially active”. The report analyzes the configurations of the two calderas at the summit of Mt. Natib, and concludes that the smaller caldera is younger, made by a later eruption, because it disrupts the rim of the larger caldera. By the same simple reasoning, we can tell which of two overlapping footprints in mud came last. Sonido and Umbal also studied the system of faults exposed on land in the larger region. They estimated the recurrence period for earthquakes of Magnitude 6.4 to 7.0 at 22 years; of Magnitude 7.0 to 7.3 at 59 years; and of Magnitude 7.3 to 8.2 at 157 years. The Cabato et al. 2005 article In 1997, Ms. Joan Cabato and Dr. Fernando Siringan of the National Institute of Geological Sciences of UP Diliman and I, collaborating with the Mines and Geosciences Bureau and the National Power Corp., initiated a geophysical study of the marine geology of Subic Bay (Figure 3)4. The study was supported as “due diligence” hazard evaluation by then SBMA Chairman Richard J. Gordon. From a slowly moving boat or ship, we gathered 125 kilometers of “seismic reflection” data. That method puts powerful pulses of low-frequency sound into the water that passes down through it and into the layers of sediment below the sea floor. Some of the sound is reflected back upwards from the different sediment layers, and is collected by hydrophones trailing behind the boat. Much as if we took an X-ray, electronic equipment automatically uses the returned signals to make a detailed picture of the structure underlying the sea, in our case down to a depth of about 120 meters. Our work underwent rigorous scrutiny by our geological peers in the Philippines and abroad, before it was published in the international Journal of Asian Earth Sciences4. It earned a Masters degree for Joan Cabato, a very bright young woman who recently earned her doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Quite by accident, we discovered a large mass of sediment that can only be explained as the underwater deposit of a large pyroclastic flow from the large Natib caldera that occurred sometime between 11,000 and 18,000 years ago. The Explanatory Note to Congressman Cojuangco’s Bill wrongly uses that date for Natib’s latest eruption: “Top geologists have evaluated Bataan and, with the exception of Mt. Natib which is a dormant volcano whose last eruption was estimated to have been between 11.3 to 18 thousand years ago (Cabato et al. 2005) and which is ten kilometers (10 km) from the BNPP, could find no anomalies in locating the plant there.” 12 FIGURE 3. Faults and earthquakes in the vicinity of Subic Bay, northwest of Mt. Natib. Left: White lines on land are documented or suspected faults on land. Solid lines in the bay are submarine faults; the U and D notations indicate the sides of each fault that moved up or down relative to the other side. The circles denote earthquake epicenters and their senses of displacement. Right: Vertical cross sections, showing buried faults in the bay. Modified from Cabato et al., 20054. A systematic study of Natib itself could find evidence of even younger eruptions. In fact, the smaller caldera disrupts the rim of the larger one, thus must have been formed by a later eruption. Cojuangco ignored the principal finding of our survey: that faults in Subic Bay are active roughly every 2,000 years, and that the last episode of faulting took place about 3,000 years ago. When one of the faults is active, one side of it moves up or down vertically as much as 5 meters relative to the other side. Our data cannot tell how much horizontal movement occurred. We also cannot say whether such movements are rapid enough to generate tsunamis, but this is a genuine possibility. A similar marine seismic-reflection survey needs to be conducted south of Subic Bay and Mt. Natib, to determine the presence or absence of similar faults. My understanding is that UP professors Mahar Lagmay and Fernando Siringan have proposed to conduct this work. In March, 2009 Congress approved a bill designating P100 million for such studies, but the funds have not yet materialized, or have instead been given to the KEPCO, the Korean Electric Power Company, which operates two reactors sister to BNPP and is offering to renovate it. Without funding, Dr. Lagmay and other volunteer geologists have been studying the environs of BNPP for several months, and have documented much evidence for faulting there13. 13 On the nature of faulting and earthquakes Widely publicized statements by Cojuangco and his allies declaring the BNPP site to be fault-free and therefore safe are not only wrong, they mislead the general public about the earthquake hazard. In the first place, For example, Manileňos need to know that a major earthquake on the West Marikina Valley fault would probably be most damaging not along the fault zone itself, but in places built on natural and artificial bay fill kilometers away, including Tondo and the Asia Mall. The earthquake damage directly along the trace of a fault is usually minor compared to the total damage in the affected area. We must remember that the great 1990 earthquake in Nueva Ecija greatly damaged Baguio and Dagupan, cities 100 kilometers away from the epicenter. Any college student in an introductory geology course knows that earthquakes usually occur in a fault zone along new breaks called “rogue faults”. The 1990 magnitude 7.8 earthquake centered beneath Rizal, Nueva Ecija created entirely new breaks in the ground. So the lack of a fault trace at any earthquake-prone locality does not mean that an earthquake cannot occur there. Thus, the great attention Cojuangco and his geologist ally, Dr. Carlo Arcilla, Director of the U.P. National Instutute of Geological Sciences, are paying to the search for a fault under the BNPP is very strange. This obsession with faults directly under the BNPP, and frequent statements by Cojuangco and allies including UP professsors Carlo Arcilla and Solita Monsod that Japan is volcanic and earthquake-prone and yet very much powered by nuclear reactors, ignore the lessons of the July 6, 2007 Niigataken Chuetsu-oki earthquake. The July 2007 earthquake and the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station in Japan The magnitude 6.6 earthquake (Figure 4) occurred 17 km below the surface, its focus 23 km offshore from the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station14,15,16. This nuclear facility, the largest in the world with a 60.5 trillion watt-hour peak annual output – more than 1,200 times the total Philippine consumption – has been shut down ever since. The earthquake was generated by a “reverse” or “thrust” fault. The motion occurred when a block of offshore crust was suddenly forced underneath the landward crust on which the K-KNPS sits, pushing it upwards. Such motion against the pull of gravity causes more damage than the sideways motions caused by an earthquake of equivalent magnitude along faults like the Philippine Fault. 14 FIGURE 4. The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station and the 16 July 2007 magnitude 6.8 Niigataken Chuetsu-oki earthquake. Left, a pre-earthquake geological offshore survey recognized four short earthquake traces numbered F-A to F-D. Fault F-B, 7 kilometers long, was mistakenly adjudged to be inactive. After the earthquake, it was more than three times longer (red lines). The earthquake occurred on a plane dipping southeastward from F-B underneath the K-KNPS (modified from Takekuro, 200816). Right, ground rupture at the K-KNPS. From Cyranoski, 200714 . Major earthquakes generated along the Manila Trench are also reverse faults. The motion from such an earthquake at the BNPP would also be upwards. Direct evidence of fault displacement could be entirely missing at the BNPP itself, because it would occur many kilometers below the surface. The right panel of Figure 4 shows that the Niigataken Chuetsu-oki earthquake did cause ground rupture at the K-KNPS, but this was caused not directly by fault displacement, but by earthquake waves propagating through the site. This picture demonstrates that nobody can guarantee that the BNPP is immune from ground rupture from earthquakes, as Cojuangco claims Phivolcs has assured him. The Japanese, as industrially advanced as they are, do make huge mistakes, such as building the K-KNPS in the first place. Quoting the IAEA15. “The … levels of seismic ground motion estimated in the design process were very significantly exceeded by the event... the newly calculated seismic hazard at the site is much higher than both the July 2007 event and the original design earthquake level.” K-KNPS has had serious problems before14. After deliberately falsified data were discovered in September 2002, all seven reactors were shut down. Units 1, 2, and 3 generated no electricity during the entire 2003 fiscal year, so the station produced only a third of its capacity. So much also for Cojuangco’s frequent claim that nuclear energy is reliable and safe. 15 The BNPP advocacy of Dr. Carlo Arcilla It is painful to write the following, because Carlo Arcilla is not only a colleague, but an old friend and former student as well. I served on both his Masters and Doctoral committees at the University of Illinois at Chicago. But our relationship is far outweighed by the safety of many Filipinos, and by my inflexible commitment to the honest use of science. Dr. Arcilla’s statements, although seriously mistaken, carry undeserved weight by virtue of his directorship of UP-NIGS. Dr. Arcilla first publicly and categorically declared that the BNPP was safe and had no fault near it before he even knew where the plant was situated, in a presentation at the June 2005 Asia Oceania Geosciences Society meeting in Singapore. It can be accessed on the Internet17. Slide 30 of that presentation says: "No direct evidence of fault running across facility" and "Latest satellite data suggest also no large structures directly located at nuclear plant". But his Slide 34, based on a terrain diagram he acquired from Prof. Mahar Lagmay that is supposed to back up those statements, mistakenly located the BNPP about 8 kilometers up the coast (Figure 5). The red lineaments in the diagram are suspected faults; the westernmost one passes right through the correct Napot Point site. This is may be the same one referred to in 1977 by Hernandez and Santos5 and by Sonido in 19796. The diagram also erroneously locates Pinatubo much too far to the south. Pinatubo does not abut Natib and drain into Subic Bay; the volcanoes are separated by about 17 kilometers of intervening Quaternary volcanic terrain, which in the diagram is mistakenly labeled as Pinatubo. FIGURE 2. Slide 34 of Arcilla’s 2005 presentation17, a satellite-derived terrain diagram provided by Dr. Mahar Lagmay. I have properly labeled the actual position of Napot Point, where the BNPP is situated. The volcanic complex north of Mt. Natib is improperly labeled Pinatubo, which is actually 17 kilometers to the north. 16 Dr. Arcilla showed his predisposition in favor of the BNPP in an Inquirer interview18 he gave Tonette Orejas on January 21 when he accompanied Cojuangco to the Congressional “ocular inspection” of the BNPP. “Arcilla, director of the National Institute of Geological Sciences at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, said the BNPP is not located near a fault. "’There is no fault near here [There’s no fault near here],’" Arcilla said, addressing an important issue that had hounded the BNPP since its construction in 1976. “An independent study he is starting would confirm that information, Arcilla said. “The plant’s location near Mt. Natib, he said, would not be a problem.” These statements were too momentous to take at face value; my wife and I verified them by listening to Orejas’ tape of the interview. Is it surprising, then, that an electrical-resistivity survey Arcilla conducted later confirmed his prejudgment by finding no evidence of a fault? An electrical-resistivity survey cannot definitively rule out the presence of a fault, Dr. Arcilla’s pronouncements to the contrary. The direct evidence presented by Hernandez and Santos in 19775 and Sonido in 19796 is much more meaningful. At the House Appropriations Committee hearing on the BNPP in February, Arcilla cited as evidence for the lack of faulting at Napot Point its absence in the MGB fault map. Unfortunately, Prof. Solita Monsod echoed that argument on nationwide GMA Ch 7. That spurious reasoning means that the Subic Bay faults mapped in 2005 by Cabato et al.4 also do not exist. Likewise, the Maraunot Fault cutting into the Pinatubo caldera published in 2007 by Lagmay et al., also the many Bicol faults mapped and published by Lagmay’s Volcano-Tectonic Laboratory at UP-NIGS. Dr. Arcilla made many statements in a March 8, 200919 interview that cannot go unchallenged. He said that an impending Natib eruption can be predicted in time to shut the plant down. That may be true, but it would not be possible to move the spent fuel rods to prevent catastrophe. He acknowledged that Mt. Natib is potentially active, but said that the risk of an eruption during the 60 years that the BNPP will operate is very small. The IAEA is much more cautious. When Napot Point was chosen to be the BNPP site in the 1970s, the IAEA had no safety standards for siting nuclear plants in volcanic terrain. It now does20. Quoting from those standards: 17 “Within a geographic region, volcanic activity can persist for longer time scales than associated with individual volcanoes. For example, many volcanic arcs exhibit recurring volcanic activity for longer than 10 Ma [million years], although individual volcanoes within the arc itself may remain active only for around 1 Ma. Because such distributed activity can persist for many millions of years, volcanic regions that have had activity during the past 10 [million years] should be considered to have at least the potential for future activity.” In that context, remember that the 1991 Pinatubo eruption, the world’s worst of the last century, only 18 years ago. And Cabato et al. showed a pyroclastic flow from Mt. Natib no older than 18,000 years. Furthermore, there is evidence that Mt. Mariveles erupted as recently as 4,059 years ago21. Arcilla offered, as proof of Natib’s harmlessness, that Phivolcs is not monitoring the volcano. Keep in mind that Pinatubo was also unmonitored until it became restive only three months before its 1991 eruption. He defended the design of the BNPP by the safety records of “carbon copies” of the plant operating in Korea and Taiwan since the 1980s. Both countries have healthy “cultures of safety” that we clearly lack, and Korea has neither volcanoes nor frequent seismicity. And refer to a recent Korean news item that details many problems22. As proof of the BNPP invulnerability to earthquakes, he said that it was not damaged by the 1990 Luzon earthquake. This is absurd; the plant was not running! Think of the spent fuel pool, the vulnerable cooling-water intake, and high-tension cables of an operating plant. He said the BNPP was mothballed as a reaction to the Chernobyl catastrophe in the Ukraine, but that US-designed nuclear power plants were far safer than their Russian counterparts. That may be true, but recall the details of shoddy BNPP construction described by Fortune Magazine9. The single most stubborn problem facing the nuclear power industry is the safe disposal of nuclear waste. According to the Journal Nature, the world’s most respected scientific publication, no country in the world has yet solved this problem23. Arcilla cites the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in underground salt deposits near Carlsbad, New Mexico as a model for nuclear-waste disposal. But WIPP accepts only transuranic waste -- clothing, equipment, tools, sludges, and soils contaminated during weapons manufacture. It cannot accept the high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, which emits too much heat and includes too much liquid. In the meantime, more than 77,000 tons of nuclear waste remain in spent-fuel pools and open-air casks at more than a hundred power plants in 32 of the United States. Since 1978, the United States has spent more than $90 billion in testing the proposed national waste depository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada24. But the repository is considered unsafe because of its volcanic and tectonic histories -- much less recent than Natib’s. In March 2009 the Obama administration declared that the Yucca mountain project is no longer as option25. No site has yet been identified to take its place. 18 And yet, Arcilla boasts, “Give me one island out of our 7,000 and I can find ways to store nuclear waste safely in the Philippines.” Recent earthquakes In the years since Marcos decided to go nuclear, many more earthquakes have occurred in the vicinity of BNPP (Fig. 5). From 1973 to 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey25 has located many earthquakes of moderate magnitude in the vicinity of the BNPP, one of them directly under Napot Point, like the one mentioned by Hernandez and Santos in 19775. FIGURE 5. Earthquakes in the Mt. Natib and BNPP vicinity, 1973-2008. From USGS National Earthquake Information Center25. The Lubao Lineament In 1997, Prof. Fernando Siringan, his students and I began to study land subsidence in coastal Bataan, Pampanga, Bulacan and Kamanava. Very early, we noticed a sharp lineament in Lubao, Pampanga that trends southwest to Mt. Natib, where it abruptly disappears (Figure 6). Many of the earthquake epicenters in Figure 5 plot along the lineament which, if extended farther, trends to Napot Point. The possibility that the lineament is a fault, and the possibility that it extends under Mt. Natib need urgently to be explored by scientists of Phivolcs and other institutions. Professor Mahar Lagmay has 19 established genetic relationships between faults and volcanoes, including Mt. Pinatubo and the Bicol volcanoes. FIGURE 6. Landsat image showing the Bataan Peninsula and the Lubao lineament. Concluding Statement: A Retrospective Congressman Cojuangco claims that the Philippines owes its status as a poorly industrialized impoverished country to its lack of electricity, and that the operation of the BNPP will go a long way toward correcting that status. I prefer to attribute our industrial and technological backwardness to a national lack of respect for science and scientific fact, so graphically illustrated by the entire sorry history of the BNPP and the current efforts to revive it. Since beginning to study lahars at Mayon Volcano in the 1980s, my data, if judged “inconvenient” by various governmental entities, have been trivialized, distorted or disregarded, and the people have suffered. While conducting our pioneering lahar studies at Mayon, young Phivolcs geologists and I were continually frustrated as we watched how government engineers ignored or misused our knowledge as they built flimsy, graft-ridden “lahar containment” dikes. When a small lahar damaged one, it would be repaired to the same flimsiness. Volume for volume, laharic debris flows are an order of magnitude more powerful than stormfloods. But our knowledge never made it to the engineer’s drafting table or to the structure in the field. That disregard or misuse of science finally bore its ill fruit two decades after we began studying Mayon lahars. In November 2006, lahars spawned on Mayon by Typhoon 20 Reming “…overtopped river bends, breaching six dikes through which they created new paths, buried downstream communities in thick, widespread deposits, and caused most of the 1,266 fatalities,” as described in the international scientific literature in a paper first-authored by Engielle Paguican, another bright young Filipina scientist. To this day, no one is accountable for these deaths. Apologists for the failed dikes say that nothing can withstand a supertyphoon. But proper hazard-containment engineering builds for the worst case. To do otherwise merely endangers people by giving them false assurance of their safety. The engineering sins and graft at Mayon were repeated on a much larger scale at Pinatubo. In 1995, a new dike was built along the Gugu River between San Fernando and Bacolor in Pampanga. People in its shadow believed that the dike protected them. But on 1 November 1995, the worst disaster at Pinatubo happened when lahars of Typhoon Mameng overwhelmed the Gugu dike. Huge lahars, enlarged by eroding and absorbing a one-kilometer stretch of the dike, descended upon Cabalantian, a Pampanga barangay of some ten thousand souls. To this day, no one is held accountable for the many deaths in Cabalantian. More recently, Dr. Fernando Siringan of the Marine Science Institute and I continue to battle the life-threatening Kamanava flood-control project of the Department of Public Works and Highways. That 5 billion peso project both ignores and trivializes our data, confirmed by NAMRIA, that show Kamanava unevenly sinking several centimeters every year. The project also blatantly minimizes the heights of storm waves and surges that would obliterate the dikes and river walls during a major typhoon. Truly, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, in a country where the desires of a dictator with no scientific training, followed decades later by a similarly uninformed legislator, outweigh technical and scientific fact and endanger the populace. A postscript: Dr. Joan Cabato, the first author of our paper on Subic Bay faulting, is now a PhD, an expert on the geochemistry of lithium in Germany. That element, in this age of energy crisis and innovation, carries enormous weight by virtue of its use in ultramodern electricity storage. The abuse of her research can only discourage her from returning. Sources The pro-BNPP propagandists make extravagant claims that are mostly undocumented. I have taken pains to provide references from reputable sources, and wherever possible have provided satellite links for easy access. This is a “living document” that will be updated whenever necessary. Corrections and additions will be appreciated 1Science and Global Security, volume 11, pages 1–51. 2http://www.cfr.org/publication/8967/are_nuclear_spent_fuel_pools_secure.html. 3Chen, Chang-Hwa and J.J.-S. Shen, 2004, Discussions on “The IAEA Guidelines for Assessing Volcanic Hazards at Nuclear Facilities”. Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research v. 134, p. 339– 342. 21 4Cabato, M. E. J. A., K. S. Rodolfo, and F. P. Siringan, 2005, History of sedimentary infilling and faulting in Subic Bay, Philippines revealed in high-resolution seismic reflection profiles: Jour. Asian Earth Science 25 849-858. 5Report on the evaluation of the geological and seismological studies made on the Philippine Nuclear Power Plant – I Site. 8 pp. 6Field inspection of the trenches constructed by NPC to answer PAEC Question No. 2 entitled ‘Confirming the absence of shore faults south of Napot Point, Morong, Bataan’. 7Salaverria, L., 8 February 2009, “Nuke plant unsafe, says study”. Philippine Daily Inquirer. http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20090208-188076/Nuke-plant-unsafe-saysstudy. Accessed 8 February 2009. 8Salaverria, L., 5 March 2009, “BNPP study missing, solon says”. Philippine Daily Inquirer. http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/nation/view/20090305-192446/BNPP-study-missing-solon-says. 9Dumaine, B. with associate B.D. Fromson, 1 September 1986, “The $2.2 billion nuclear fiasco”Fortune Magazine, vol. 114, p. 38ff. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1986/09/01/67989/index.htm. 10Ruaya, J. R. and C. C. Panem, 1991, Mt. Natib, Philippines: a geochemical model of a caldera-hosted geothermal system: Jour. Volcanol. & Geothermal Res. 45 255-365. 11Torres, R., “The vulnerability of PNPP site to the hazards of Natib volcano”PHIVOLCS Observer 8:3:1-4. 12Geology and geohazards evaluation of the Subic Bay area: Implications on future development and environmental management plan. Internal report submitted to Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority, 38 pp. 13Lagmay, A. M. F., E. Rodolfo, L. Soria, E. Paguican, G. Tiu et al., Geology of southwest Natib Volcano. 29th Annual PAASE Meeting and Symposium (29APAMS), Ateneo de Manila University, Loyola Heights, Quezon City, July 13-15, 2009. 14Cyranoski, D., 26 July 2007, “Quake shuts world's largest nuclear plant”. Nature 448, 392-393. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7152/full/448392a.html. Accessed 30 July 2007. 15IAEA Staff Report, 29 January 2009, “ Third Report on Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant”. http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/2009/kashiwazaki290109.html. Accessed May 5, 2009. 16Takekuro, Ichiro, 26 February 2008, Quest for Safety: Enhancing Seismic Safety and Emergency Preparedness in light of the Niigataken Chuetsu-oki Earthquake. International Symposium on Seismic Safety of Nuclear Power Plants and Lessons Learned from the Niigataken Chuetsu-oki Earthquake. http://www.jaif.or.jp/pdf/2008_03_Takekuro_en.pdf. Accessed January 30, 2009 17Mothballed Philippine Nuclear Power Plant – Some Postmortem Perspectives". http://www.pnri.dost.gov.ph/documents/BataanNuclearPowerPlantPostmortemPerspectives.pdf Accessed 12 February 2009. 18Orejas, Tonette, January 22, 2009, “Nuke plant ‘ready to run’, says solon”. Philippine Inquirer. http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/nation/view/20090122-184944/Nuke-plant-ready-to-run-sayssolon. First Posted 19:28:00 01/22/2009. Accessed February 23, 2009. 19Papa, Alcuin, March 8, 2009, “No active fault at BNPP – geologist”. Philippine Inquirer. http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/talkofthetown/view/20090308-192920/No-active-fault-at-BNPP-- geologist. Accessed March 8, 2009. 20IAEA, 31 March 2009, Volcanic Hazards in Site Evaluation for Nuclear Installations. 21Valentik, A.C.M, et al., 2009, Aspects of volcanic hazards assessments for the Bataan nuclear power plant, Luzon Peninsula, Philippines. In C.B. Connor et al., eds., Volcanic and Tectonic Hazard Assessment for Nuclear Facilities. Cambridge University Press, p. 257-286. DS405 Draft Safety Guide. 22Kim, H-c, 29 January 2009, “Frequent Problems Cloud Nuclear Power Plan: 3 Incidents in 2 Months; Civic Group Cites Secrecy-First Policy as Point of Concern”. Korea Times. http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/01/123_38627.html. Accessed 30 March 2009. 23Brumfiel, G., 20 April 2006, Forward planning. Nature v. 1440 p. 987-989. 24Tetreault, S., 16 July 2008, “Yucca Mountain cost estimate tops $90 billion”. Las Vegas Review-Journal. http://www.lvrj.com/news/25498919.html. Accessed 10 May 2009. 25Hebert, H. Josef. 2009. “Nuclear waste won't be going to Nevada's Yucca Mountain, Obama official says.” Chicago Tribune. March 6, 2009. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-nukeyucca_ frimar06,0,2557502.story Accessed 6 April 2009. 26National Earthquake Information Center, United States Geological Survey. http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/epic/epic_rect.html.
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