A tale of two nuclear nations
Reporting on atomic energy in the Philippines and China.
My final two HuffPost stories have been published, and they look at the atomic energy ambitions on both sides of what one country calls the South China Sea and the other calls the West Philippine Sea.
Last June, I flew to Manila to speak at the East-West Center’s annual media conference. While there, I met up with Mark Cojuangco, a national lawmaker, scion of one of the Philippines great political families and the Southeast Asian nation’s most vocal support of joining the 32 countries that use nuclear power.
His dream is to finish what his country already started. In the 1980s, the Philippines completed work on its first nuclear power plant, a single-reactor facility built by the American atomic energy giant Westinghouse on a craggy outcropping on the Bataan peninsula, at the opposite end of Manila Bay from the sprawling capital megacity. Right as the fuel arrived, however, dictator Ferdinand Marcos was deposed, and – in the wake of Chernobyl – the new government mothballed the facility. It’s sat there ever since, receiving roughly $1 million per year in maintenance money.
Cojuangco wants to finally bring the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant online. But the Americans have barely shown any interest. The Russians shrugged it off, too. The Koreans – who successfully established themselves as leading exporters with the completion of the United Arab Emirates’ first nuclear station – seem very intrigued, and have recently sent teams to examine Bataan. The preliminary findings suggest completing the pressurized water reactor there could be done at fraction of the cost of a new build. The recent legal detente between one of Korea’s leading nuclear companies and Westinghouse following a years-long intellectual property dispute, plus new leadership at the Pittsburgh-based firm, should probably provide Cojuangco a big boost of confidence.
The case for nuclear power in the Philippines is quite clear. The country is growing fast, but it simply can’t generate enough electricity to meet all its needs. Power prices are the highest in Southeast Asia. While other countries that lack domestic energy resources like South Korea, Taiwan and Japan all used atomic energy to become tech-manufacturing powerhouses in the latter half of the 20th century, the Philippines remains stuck in a mid-tier status, producing cheap commodity semiconductors, but really depending on industries like call centers for prosperity.
High-quality global polling from the consultancy Radiant Energy found that 69% of Filipinos support using nuclear power, though just 46% back building new reactors. If Bataan can successfully enter into service, that could change.
You can read the full story from my trip to the Philippines here.
One country that doesn’t factor into the Philippines plans for atomic energy is the nation building more reactors than any other.
China is set to eclipse the U.S. as the world’s top user of nuclear energy by the 2030s. There’s no question as to why. Not only did China finish building four units of the leading American reactor model – Westinghouse’s lauded AP1000 – before the U.S. could finish its first, Beijing reverse engineered the third-generation reactor and made its own versions.
As the U.S. shied away from building more AP1000s and China made plans to start exporting its versions overseas, American developers zeroed in on small modular reactors – lower-powered, shrunken down units meant to bring down costs through assembly-line repetition. But the U.S. has yet to build one. Meanwhile, Russia built the first floating SMR in the Arctic, and China is finishing work on the world’s first land-based SMR, the Linglong-1 reactor in Hainan.
Like most reactors, including the only U.S.-certified SMR design from the Oregon-based developer Nuscale, Linglong-1 uses water as a coolant. Much of the hype in American SMRs recently has focused on the so-called fourth-generation designs that use coolants other than water. The benefit of this technology is that the reactors can reach higher temperatures, in theory making them more capable of industrial processes that require fossil fuels today. The drawback is that it’s expensive and lacks the last seven decades of practice water-cooled reactors had to perfect how they’re run. The SMR companies Bill Gates, Amazon, and Google all invested in are Gen-IV reactors.
While the U.S. has yet to license one, China connected its first prototype high-temperature gas-cooled reactor to the grid last year. Analysts say that places Beijing at least 10 years ahead of the U.S.
Sadly, despite the efforts I describe in the story, I was not able to get a visa to visit any nuclear sites in China. I hope I can find a new opportunity in the next year or so.
Instead, my story opens with the perspective of a Ghanaian student at China’s Tsinghua University, who dreams of bringing nuclear technology to his West African homeland.
You can read the full story here.
For more on this, I recommend:
Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast interview with Shanghai-based analyst David Fishman, who is well worth following on X.
The International Energy Agency’s newly-published Pathway to a New Era for Nuclear Energy white paper.
Reuters’ scoop from last month on China’s apparent construction of a new nuclear fusion facility.
Singaporean broadcaster CNA’s 45-minute documentary last year on Bataan.
My debut on Filipino TV last year, a 20-minute interview on the widely-watched ANC channel’s “Headstart” program:
Special thanks to all of you who are new here and subscribed in the wake of the news of my buyout at HuffPost. You are most welcome.
Given the typically serious nature of what I write about here, I like to add some levity by suggesting a song at the end of each newsletter.
This edition’s music is the song “Lw Kan” by El Shab Arab from the Tripoli-born Egyptian singer’s 1993 album. I heard it playing in a Palestinian cafe here in my neighborhood a few months ago, and I have been hooked ever since.
Signing off from snowy Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where my wife and I returned early yesterday from our babymoon to avoid driving on icy roads. Sure enough, as we turned off the Belt Parkway onto Shore Road, all the buses had chains on their tires. The energy-efficiency nerd in me often resents how hot our pre-war apartment gets in the winter, a symptom of the post-Spanish Flu building norms that were meant to encourage open windows and air flow even in the winter. But on days like today, as I enjoy the toasty warmth, the radiators’ hiss is like music to me.