By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.NET
MANILA, Philippines – “Keep your interests alive.”
This was the message of Balik-Scientist awardee Dr. Baldomero Olivera at the start of the 2009 National Science and Technology Week at the Manila Hotel.
Olivera, a distinguished professor of biology at the University of Utah, first gained fame for his discovery of painkilling properties in the highly toxic, ocean-going cone snails that are abundant in Philippine waters.
Olivera’s discovery led to the development of a commercial painkiller called Ziconotide (Prialt), which is administered to patients suffering from extreme pain. Unlike traditional painkiller morphine, Ziconotide is not known to cause painkiller addiction and lasts much longer in the system.
Olivera graduated from the University of the Philippines and moved to the US to take up his graduate degree in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.
His interests in cone shells started long before he started college; in fact, he started out at a tennis court collecting shells.
“Seashells were used to compact the surface of tennis courts. They were dredged from Manila Bay and were dumped near the tennis courts. While waiting for my dad, I used to sift through the heap of shells and identified what were interesting.”
It was this interest that made him go back to cone snails for possible research. It also won him “Scientist of the Year” in 2007 by the Harvard Foundation.
At his keynote speech during the NSTW opening ceremonies, Olivera said he hopes more Filipino scientists to continue their research endeavors and to give back to the country. He said many researches can provide economic gains to both the scientific community as well as to the country.
Department of Science and Technology Secretary Estrella Alabastro said this year’s NSTW aims to spur Filipino scientists and researchers to find ways in resolving global issues. One goal is to alleviate global climate change, which is causing destruction in many industries in the Philippines, particularly agriculture.
Numerous programs will be conducted in different locations nationwide for the entire week of the NSTW. There are seminars of nanotechnology, robotics, awareness programs on waste management, business ventures based on scientific output, research presentations on health, genetics, food development, among others.
The NSTW was first created under Presidential Proclamation 2214 in 1982 and was later amended in 1993 through Republic Act 169. This declared celebrations for the NSTW on the third week of July every year.
July 2009 Archives
A French nuclear expert says that the Philippines should not use the French experience to justify the reactivation of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant. Yves Marignac, a consultant on nuclear and energy issues and Executive Director of the energy-information agency, WISE-Paris. wrote his remarks in a July opinion piece for Cleantech Asia Online, an opinion site for cleantech in Asia.
In his oped, Marignac said that the French experience is a pretend success story. “While there is no clear benefit from rehabilitating the Philippine Bataan plant, the risks of doing so are real,” said Marignac.
Marignac said that as early as 1995, the French nuclear safety authority said that none of their existing 58 French reactors could be licensed to current standards, most especially the old ones, built at the same time as the Bataan plant and using a similar Westinghouse design, even if safety upgrades following the Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986) accidents were taken into account. He added that thirty years of ageing of all the reactor’s components make the upgrading effectiveness highly uncertain. Marignac says “it will be impossible to check all possible defects in concrete walls, metallic containments, electric wires, etc.”
He also cited concerns with nuclear waste disposal. Marignac said that waste fuel reprocessing results in a complex set of radioactive waste and nuclear materials like uranium and plutonium. “Should the Bataan spent fuel be reprocessed in France, the highly radioactive part, at least, of the waste would come back, needing the same kind of management scheme that is needed for spent fuel in the first place,” he said. According to Marignac, no country, including France, has yet implemented a final geological disposal for these highly active and long-lived materials.
“Moreover, it is unlikely that the recovered plutonium could be reused in the old-designed Bataan reactor, leaving the operator with the only option of paying another company to take it, like the Dutch company EPZ is doing in the same situation,” he said. He also cited concerns with cost escalation from original estimates. “The new French reactor
being built in Flamanville, for instance, was decided four years ago on the basis of a complete cost calculation by the Ministry of Industry of 28.4 €/MWh, giving it a narrow competitive margin. The operator, EDF, recently raised its estimate to 55 €/MWh, an increase of around 92% from the original estimate,” Marignac said.
Marignac has a wealth of experience in nuclear issues. He worked at the Paris-XI University, the French Energy Commission (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique) and the nuclear company Société des Techniques en Milieu Ionisant (STMI). Marignac has authored many publications on energy, nuclear and global environmental issues, and has acted as an expert for France’s Prime Minister’s services and the European Parliament. He is currently a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IFPM).
by Dennis Posadas
Coal is cheap and plentiful. Unlike oil, majority of which is controlled by OPEC states, coal can be found in many areas of the world, including the Philippines. As such, it has formed a significant portion of electric power generated worldwide, despite recent inroads by nuclear and renewable energy.
Majority of those coal plants belch CO2 into the atmosphere, which is why NASA chief climate scientist Jim Hansen and many other experts say publicly that there should be a moratorium on the building of coal plants worldwide.
Last April, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared that six greenhouse gases were a threat to human health and welfare. Chief among the six greenhouse gases was carbon dioxide (CO2). One of the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the world is the electric power industry, particularly those that operate coal plants. The US alone emits around a billion-and-a-half tons of CO2 annually from electric power generation through coal.
Try telling that to fast growing China and India, or the US. Or even to developing economies around the world like the Philippines. This needs to be discussed widely, because frankly, while clean energy is a great topic for discussion, there are still technical and economic issues in getting from where we are now to the point where we can replace coal totally.
Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, one of the largest electric utilities in the US, said in an interview in an episode of 60 Minutes (a popular U.S. television show) earlier this year, that Hansen’s proposal to stop the building of new coal plants cannot be done. While Rogers was one of the first electric utility CEOs who used coal plants to acknowledge the problem of global warming from coal, he says that the industry will arrive at a solution, but not at the pace that Hansen is recommending. When asked if his company had already made the investments towards so called clean coal technology, he said that they are in the process of studying the alternatives.
In reality, clean coal technology is really a way to capture the CO2 and store it underground. The technical term for the technology is called Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
One way to implement CCS is to pass the CO2 emission through a group of compounds called amines. This mixture is then pumped about one kilometer deep underground, into rock formations which have a lot of cracks that can absorb the mixture. The intense pressure underground causes the CO2 to liquefy, where it is hoped that the CO2 will stay underground forever. The solid form of CO2 is dry ice, which most of us have seen.
But the long-term effectiveness of CCS is still unknown. If despite the expense to implement, it will still leak CO2 into the atmosphere, then the exercise will be a gargantuan waste of resources. There are a limited number of sites around the world that have built CCS facilities but a study on the long term effectiveness of CCS has yet to be conducted. A coal expert who I spoke to, but declined to be identified surmised that one possible scenario is a leak caused by an earthquake in the vicinity, although he said that it was a hypothesis.
Aside from this, the scale of CCS is mindboggling. Unlike the nuclear power industry which can take nuclear wastes and store it in distant centralized repositories like Yucca Mountain in the US, each coal plant will need to have access to a CCS facility nearby.
The US alone emits more than a billion- and-a-half tons of CO2 a year, not counting China and India, which gives an idea of the undertaking. In the end, it could all boil down to costs. In 2004, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released a study called "The Future of Coal" which discussed the outlook for CCS technology. It estimated that to make CCS competitive, carbon emissions will have to be charged at around $30/ton. Recently, the US House of Representatives, through the Democrat sponsored Waxman-Markey bill, looks like it has arrived at a compromise, but will this be enough to justify CCS in new coal plants? Even if the US signs a treaty in Copenhagen later this year, it will be very hard to get private industry to support CCS if the economics doesn’t make sense.
At this point theoretically CCS looks like a way to make coal a potentially non-environmentally threatening energy source. However, unless the technology and economics is brought up to speed and more research is done, it will remain simply a public relations tool brought up by the coal industry to fend off attacks against it for the moment.
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Dennis Posadas is the Editor of Cleantech Asia Online, a newly launched site devoted to opinions and insights about the Asia cleantech economy. He is also the author of Jump Start: A Technopreneurship Fable (Singapore: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009)
