The Philippines' Most Expensive White Elephant

The Bataan Nuclear Plant

"Located on a cliff overlooking the ocean in Morong, Bataan is one of the most — if not the most — expensive projects undertaken by the Philippine government.  The price tag to build the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) was originally $500 million for two 620-megawatt reactors.  Indeed, it would have been the biggest nuclear power plant in Southeast Asia at that time.  The project was started in 1976 and completed in 1984 at a cost of $2.3 billion!

Today, BNPP has not produced a single watt of electricity.  However, the government has been paying interest on the loan at a staggering amount of $155,000 a day.  That’s a lot ofmoolah! To put it in perspective, that’s enough money to build 50,000 Gawad Kalinga homes a year for 30 years, which would provide housing for more than 7,000,000 poor Filipinos.  That was just the interest.  You factor in the loan principal and another 10,000,000 poor Filipinos would have houses.  That’s 20% of the total population of the country."  

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