Earlier, I posted part of the article "Misrepresenting Science" that was emailed to me by my friend, Natalie. Rep. Mark Cojuangco's plans for reviving the mothballed Bataan Nuclear Powered Plant are clearly on a roll - such that he feted his fellow Representatives on a grand tour of the mammoth building (and did such a good job 'selling' the revival plans that he reportedly got their support!). Today, I am posting the continuation of the article. Read the real scientific analysis from senior geologists and scientists who are against the revival of the BNPP.
(continuation of the article "Misrepresenting Science" by Rene B. Azurin)
For now, let's focus on the science. Dr. Kelvin Rodolfo, professor emeritus of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences of the University of Illinois at Chicago and a balik-scientist who now teaches at the National Institute of Geological Sciences of the University of the Philippines in Diliman, says that those who are trying to justify the activation of the BNPP have been guilty of "abusing scientific data." In particular, he says that Mr. Cojuangco is "dangerously misrepresenting" the scientific data contained in a paper authored by Dr. Joan Cabato, Dr. Fernando Siringan, and himself and in another written by Dr. Ernesto Sonido and Mr. Jesse Umbal, both on the geology of the BNPP site.
Dr. Rodolfo says that they were "dismayed to find that the explanatory note to the bill cites our work as certifying the safety of the Bataan nuclear plant site." He quotes from said note: "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 [and] 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."
Dr. Rodolfo takes vigorous issue with Mr. Cojuangco's statements and says, first, that "the BNPP is not 10 kilometers away from Natib, it is on Natib, which constitutes the entire northern half of the Bataan peninsula." Next, he says that they did not estimate the age of Mt. Natib's last eruption in their paper. What he says they actually wrote was:
"A breach in the caldera of Mt. Natib is the most likely source of a presumed pyroclastic deposit in the eastern bay that is associated with sediments about 11,300 to 18,000 years ago, indicating that a Natib eruption occurred much more recently than previously documented for this volcano." Finally, further quoting from their paper, he says that ".the youngest [faults] show that movements occurred about every 2,000 years, most recently about 3,000 years ago." Thus, concludes Dr. Rodolfo, "judging from the geologic evidence, Subic Bay is well overdue for an episode of faulting and earthquakes."
As pointed out by Dr. Rodolfo, an exhaustive analysis of the geology and geohazards of the Subic Bay area was made by Dr. Ernesto Sonido, formerly geophysics professor of the National Institute of Geological Sciences at UP, and Mr. Jesse Umbal, who obtained his masters' degree at the University of Illinois and worked with Dr. Rodolfo during the Mt. Pinatubo eruption. In their paper, Dr. Sonido and Mr. Umbal adjudged Natib as "potentially active." They found Mt. Natib, like Mt. Pinatubo, to be a "caldera-forming" volcano, a type which (Dr. Rodolfo says), "characteristically, have very powerful eruptions separated by long repose periods." The Sonido-Umbal study "documented two Natib eruptions that formed large calderas and 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."
(to be continued on the next post...)
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