Standing for 40 years in the cold near a giant city of 25 million people – 2024-03-31 13:03:31

Old and shabby. The Bataan nuclear power plant in the Philippines was completed in 1984, but it was never started. The facade of the building looks a bit shabby. This picture is also more than seven years old, from autumn 2016. Mark R. Cristino / EPA

The Philippines may turn on a nuclear power plant that was completed 40 years ago but has been sitting cold since its completion.

The possible commissioning of the 621 megawatt power plant in Bataan was reported two years ago in the spring by, among others, the news agency Reuters and the magazine World Nuclear News. At the end of February 2022, then President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte signed a new energy policy executive order with which the country aims to become independent from fossil fuels.

In Finland, the matter has not been reported since Yle reported in 2016 about the preliminary political discussion regarding the Bataan power plant.

With the order signed by Duterte, the talk and speculation turned into reality, at least to some degree. However, the order does not directly mean the commissioning of the Bataan power plant. It is a more general change of direction in the Philippines’ energy policy, and as part of this project, it is also being investigated whether the existing power plant can be commissioned.

Currently, the Philippines has no operating nuclear power plants at all.

If it is decided to start the Bataan facility, the renovation work will cost about 2-3 billion dollars, the US Department of Energy estimates in the fall of 2022, according to the World Nuclear Association.

At the moment, the Philippines’ main partner in the nuclear power sector seems to be the United States, because in the fall of 2023 the Philippines agreed with the United States on significant nuclear technology cooperation. The agreement covers not only nuclear materials, but also technological assistance for the development of so-called small reactors (smr).

In 2017, that is, before the latest decisions, the South Korean energy company Kepco offered the renovation slightly cheaper than the American estimate. According to a BBC news report last spring, the Koreans proposed a price tag of 1.5 billion dollars. Also Russian Rosatom has tried to join the patterns.

The premises of the Bataan power plant are dilapidated and shabby, at least partially, the BBC reports. On the other hand, according to WNA, the facility would have been maintained at least to some extent.

The power plant gets its name from the peninsula called Bataan, which separates Manila Bay from the upper part of the South China Sea. The power plant is located on the west coast of the peninsula, i.e. by the South China Sea.

About 60 kilometers east of the power plant is Manila, the capital of the Philippines, with 25 million people living in its urban area. The Bataan Peninsula and the metropolitan area of ​​Manila are both part of Luzon, the largest island of the Philippine archipelago.

This is how the fiasco was born

What solution the Philippines ends up with the Bataan power plant remains to be seen, both in terms of technological possibilities and politics. According to both Yle and the BBC, many are vocally opposed to the commissioning of the old power plant, but on the other hand, polls have shown that around 60 percent of the residents are in favor of nuclear power.

According to some estimates, the outcome may also be affected by the fact that in 2022 the president-elect of the Philippines Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos is the dictator of the country’s former president, who ruled at the end of the Cold War Ferdinand Marcosin son. The nuclear power project is known to be important to Marcos the elder.

American Westinghousen the Bataan power plant, based on pressurized water reactor technology, was built between 1976 and 1984 at a cost of about 2.4 billion dollars at the time, or about nine billion dollars today. Marcos Sr.’s decision to invest in nuclear power was motivated by the 1973 oil crisis.

However, fuel was never loaded into the power plant because the Filipinos had begun to fear the danger of earthquakes. The Philippine archipelago, located on the ring of fire in the Pacific Ocean, is volcanic and seismically very active, as is Japan, located further north on the same ring.

The fears were brought to the surface even before the completion of the power plant in 1979, in which it was found that the power plant was located almost on top of the fault line of the local earth’s crust. The survey was conducted in the United States after the accident at the Three Mile Island power plant.

When in the spring of 1986 Marcos Sr. was ousted from power and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in the Soviet Union, the road to the Bataan power plant was paved. The newly elected president Maria Corazon Aquino decided to abandon the nuclear power project once and for all, WNA writes.

The corruption scandals related to the construction of the power plant that were revealed at the end of the 1980s sank the project even deeper into the mire, as people no longer trusted the quality of the construction.

The Bataani power plant is one of the two nuclear power plants in the world that have been completed but left unused. The second is the Zwentendorf power plant in Austria, which was completed in 1978. Tekniikka&Talous reported on Zwentendorf on March 12.

This news was originally published In Tekniikka&Talous magazine.