Nuclear’s Long Shadow In The Philippines

It’s getting hotter — and more expensive to stay cool — in the island nation. Will it become the first in Southeast Asia to turn to atomic energy?

This story is the first installment of a two-part series on nuclear energy in Asia.

MORONG, the Philippines — On a steamy June afternoon, Jimmy Arquero, 65, took off his red cap, wiped his brow and hunkered down for some leafy shade in a concrete gutter in the middle of town. His blue eyes stared off into the distance, out of focus, and he faded for a brief moment into a daydream of how the last four decades could have been.

In that alternate timeline, the Philippines would have completed work on the nuclear power station he’d helped build in the 1980s, just a 20-minute drive northward. The single reactor at the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant would’ve become Southeast Asia’s first commercial atomic station, vaulting the fast-growing archipelago nation into the club of industrial powerhouses — Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — already powered by nuclear fission.

As a pipefitter in those early days, Arquero was making more than he’d ever earned. He might have gone on to work at a factory or a data center, or some other electricity-thirsty industry that would have been drawn to Bataan — particularly if, as had been planned, that first reactor had been followed by another, and maybe more. He might even have gotten air conditioning.

In reality, right as the plant was about to load its first uranium rods and as a generation of young operators finished their training, Filipinos ― with U.S. backing ― overthrew dictator Ferdinand Marcos, whose government had overseen the project. A month later, the world’s worst and only mass-casualty nuclear power meltdown took place at the Chernobyl plant in Soviet Ukraine. The new democratically-elected government in Manila mothballed the Bataan plant. Arquero lost his job.