BNPP haunts PBBM’s nuke pitch
If the administration is serious about affordability now, solar, storage, and grid modernization deserve the urgency nuclear power is being given in rhetoric.
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Daily TribuneIf the administration is serious about affordability now, solar, storage, and grid modernization deserve the urgency nuclear power is being given in rhetoric.
President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. wants Filipinos to revisit nuclear energy, and he is right that the conversation deserves a hearing. But the framing in his fifth SoNA — safety assured, benefits explained, costs eventually lowered — glides past the questions that matter most, and glides past them for a reason.
Marcos used his SoNA to point out the country already uses nuclear technology in medicine, agriculture, water filtration and the upcycling of plastic, as if radiotherapy machines and water filters were a rehearsal for a gigawatt-scale power plant. They are not. The gap between isotopes in a hospital and a reactor core sitting in an archipelago is the entire argument, and it went unaddressed.
Start with the ghost in the room. The Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) was never fueled, yet Filipinos serviced its debt for decades — a monument to the Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr. era graft that outlived the dictatorship itself.
Reviving the nuclear ambition under another Marcos is not merely a policy pivot, it is a test of whether the son can build the accountability structures the father never allowed.
The President’s vow that the public will be told “the benefits of nuclear energy” is not the same as a vow of transparent procurement, competitive bidding and independent safety oversight.
Filipinos have heard promises of cheap, secure power before. What they have not reliably gotten is an accounting of who will profit while the public waits for its realization.
Then there is the geography, which no political speech can amend. The Philippines sits in the Pacific Ring of Fire that is threaded with fault lines and lies squarely in the path of typhoons that grow less predictable each year.
To be sure, that does not make nuclear power impossible — France, Japan and South Korea operate reactors in seismically active zones — but it does make site selection, engineering redundancy and evacuation planning non-negotiable, expensive and slow.
A small modular reactor is not a rush job. This will take years to build and a nuclear timeline should not be compressed for political convenience.
Which brings us to the mathematics Malacañang has yet to show it is working on.
Even the most optimistic nuclear roadmaps put a first commercial plant a decade or more away, factoring in site studies, an independent regulator with actual teeth, financing, construction and safety certification.
Filipinos will not see a single peso shaved off their electric bills from nuclear power within this administration, or arguably the next one. The capital costs are enormous, typically requiring foreign financing or public-private arrangements that tend to socialize risk and privatize return — precisely the pattern that made EPIRA controversial and the Malampaya deal opaque.
So what will fill the gap between now and whatever nuclear future Marcos is promising?
The uncomfortable answer is more of the same: coal and gas-fired plants, an aging grid and the “system loss” charges that the President himself, in the same speech, asked Congress to strip from consumer bills.
He also pushed the Sariling Kuryente Act to make rooftop solar and battery storage more affordable for households — a nearer-term, more honest answer to high electricity costs than a reactor that may not exist before 2040.
If the administration is serious about affordability now, solar, storage and grid modernization deserve the urgency nuclear power is being given in rhetoric.
Nuclear energy may belong in the Philippines’ long-term mix. But the President’s remark — ”perhaps it is time to revisit” — cannot be allowed to be a talking point that will outlive scrutiny, the way Marcos Sr.’s Bataan nuclear power plant outlived its own construction.
The son owes the country more diligence than the father ever showed.
