Assessing recent nuclear rhetoric

LAST month, there were two items in the news about nuclear energy in the Philippines that caught my attention. The first was a commentary by Dr. Carlo Arcilla, the immediate past director of the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute (PNRI), published in BusinessWorld on Aug. 5. The second was a press release from the Department of Energy (DOE) on Aug. 13, reporting comments from Energy Undersecretary Giovanni Carlo Bacordo delivered in a press conference on Aug. 11.

The reason these two bits of news caught my attention is because in my head, I have a sort of flowchart or hierarchy for filtering nuclear energy news and commentary. Since I follow the nuclear industry in general closely, and the Philippines’ efforts to create one with intense scrutiny, I need some way to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Information from policymaking or regulatory entities is given attention first, followed by information from acknowledged experts who advise those policymaking or regulatory entities. Information from other credible and objective analysts would be given about the same priority as those two, with information from the nuclear or energy industries following, at some considerable distance farther down the ladder. At the bottom at the “only read this if I have nothing better to do” level is information from amateur sources, civil society and self-made advocacy groups, and Mark Cojuangco.

So, since whatever the DOE says might indicate a change or some progress in nuclear energy policy, its statements deserve some close study. And since Arcilla advises the DOE, and serves as a tool of the latter, a willing one, I’m sure, for public outreach to advocate for nuclear energy, his comments also demand close attention. That’s not to say that the information is automatically assumed to be substantive or useful, but it at least deserves a careful reading.

Both Arcilla’s op-ed piece and the DOE press release were in response to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.'s mention of nuclear energy in his 2026 State of the Nation Address (SONA) back on July 28, although he soft-pedaled a bit compared to his comments about it in his previous SONAs. As the DOE press release described it, the president “called for the country to revisit nuclear energy as part of efforts to strengthen energy security and bring down electricity costs, while underscoring that its development must be pursued safely and its benefits properly communicated to the public,” which is a fairly accurate interpretation.

Arcilla’s Aug. 5 commentary set forth what could be considered the “standard arguments” for nuclear power in the Philippines. He began by highlighting the efficiency of nuclear energy, in that it has energy density several orders of magnitude greater than other fuels, and is very reliable in use. All that is true, but the one flaw here is that Arcilla compares the capacity factor of nuclear — which he overstates slightly at 92 percent, whereas in reality it is usually about 89-90 percent — with the capacity factor of solar power, which is about 20 percent. That is an apples-to-oranges comparison; nuclear energy can serve as baseload power, and only baseload power, whereas solar power does not and really cannot.

Arcilla also pointed out, correctly, that despite the high-profile disasters over the years, nuclear energy actually does have an excellent safety record compared with other forms of large-scale generation. I’ve broken down this aspect of nuclear energy in detail in years past, and I may do so again just to refresh everyone’s memory, but from a risk-assessment perspective, Arcilla is correct. However, he then went off the rails by highlighting the “new technology” of small modular reactors (SMRs) and their new forms of even safer fuel, which is completely irrelevant because just about every pitch concerning SMRs has been decisively proven fallacious in actual practice.

Arcilla then went on to highlight the creation of the Philippine Atomic Energy Regulatory Authority (PhilATOM), which was indeed a good step, but loses the plot again by first citing the "strong public sentiment" in favor of nuclear power, and breezing over the problematic economics. He cited the figure of 79 percent public support for nuclear energy development, but that was derived from a deeply flawed survey conducted by the DOE during the Philippines’ six-year-long Amateur Hour known as the Duterte administration. He did acknowledge that nuclear energy has high upfront costs (although his figures of $5 billion to $10 billion for a new plant are unrealistically optimistic), but dismissed this by saying it would pay off in lower electricity rates in the long run. Unfortunately, that long run is 20-30 years or more, and in the meantime, consumers would be saddled with higher rates in order to pay the damn thing off.

Finally, he made an implied pitch for resurrecting the mothballed Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP), noting that identical plants in South Korea, Brazil and Slovenia operated well for decades. This is just plain silly. Keeping a plant of that vintage running is one thing (and all the ones he mentioned are scheduled for retirement in the next few years, anyway); but starting one up now is like refurbishing a 1979 Datsun Sunny for use as a daily commuter. Sure, it could work and be properly maintained — albeit with some difficulty, due to parts not being readily available — but it could never be made to be as efficient and capable as newer alternatives.

As for the DOE’s Aug. 13 press release, it really only contained one key item of interest, and it was probably not the intended message. The main point disclosed by Bacordo was that the DOE is well-advanced in “its preparations toward Phase 2” of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) three-phase milestone approach. That’s all well and good, but the part that Bacordo probably didn’t mean to say is that it establishes a clear timeline for the introduction of nuclear power in the Philippines, and it is a timeline that is not going to encourage anyone hoping for solutions to expensive and insufficiently reliable power anytime soon.

Under the milestone approach, Phase 1, which the Philippines has already passed, takes from one to three years; it actually took the Philippines closer to 10 years. Phase 2, which is “preparatory work for contracting and construction,” typically takes from three to five years, according to the IAEA. That could start here at the beginning of next year, but we will have to see how it goes. Phase 3, which is “implementing the first nuclear power plant,” is estimated by IAEA at six to seven years, although in practice it usually takes 10 to 12 years.

Thus, if everything were to go perfectly, the Philippines might see its own nuclear plant startup in 2036. If everything goes “pretty well, with a few kinks to be ironed out along the way,” that might happen in 2039. If everything goes “like it usually does,” that date gets pushed up to sometime between 2042 and 2044, with the economic payoff from that in the form of low-cost electricity coming sometime in the 2060s or 2070s.