Keep nuclear on the table

Another brownout, and suddenly everybody becomes an energy expert.

The electric fan stops. The Wi-Fi disappears. Someone reaches for a power bank. The sari-sari store owner worries about the ice cream in the freezer. A student watches the battery on the laptop slowly die. Somewhere, a restaurant starts a generator and burns expensive diesel just to keep dinner service going.

Then the familiar questions begin: Ano naman ni? Until when?

After enough rotational brownouts, the technical language starts to matter less. Generation deficiency. Grid reserves. Plant outages. Manual load dropping. Ordinary people experience all of them in much simpler terms: the lights are out again.

And after writing about our energy problems more than once, I keep coming back to a question we should no longer be afraid to ask: Why not nuclear?

I am not suggesting that we worship the atom, ignore the risks, or reopen the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) tomorrow morning because somebody found the old keys. I am saying something much simpler. Keep nuclear on the table. Study it seriously. If it can give Filipinos dependable, reasonably priced, low-carbon electricity, then it deserves more than our old fears.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. brought nuclear energy back into the national conversation in his July 27 State of the Nation Address when he called for the country to revisit nuclear energy production. The idea is hardly coming from nowhere. Nuclear already figures in the country’s long-term energy planning, alongside discussions of conventional reactors and newer technologies such as small modular reactors.

And there is a reason the nuclear question refuses to go away.

By all means, build more solar and wind. Make the most of our geothermal and hydro resources. Fix transmission, invest in storage, and cut needless consumption. The Philippines has been blessed with renewable resources, and we should use every sensible one of them.

But rotational brownouts expose the harder part of the problem: we need dependable power, not only power when conditions are favorable.

Hospitals cannot run on sunshine alone. Factories cannot schedule production around the wind. A call center cannot tell its clients, “Sorry, cloudy today.” Neither can a student tell a professor that the grid ran short of reserves again. A modern economy needs electricity at 2 p.m. and 2 a.m., during exam week and the Christmas rush, and especially when another generating plant suddenly goes offline.

That is where nuclear begins to make sense to me.

Its appeal is not simply that it can add more electricity to the grid. Nuclear can produce large amounts of low-carbon power continuously. For a country repeatedly reminded by rotational brownouts how fragile electricity supply can become, those are not just megawatts. They are dependable megawatts.

Of course, nuclear is no quick fix. A reactor approved today will not keep my electric fan running tomorrow night. Nuclear takes enormous investment, years of work, trained experts, strict safeguards, and a credible plan for radioactive waste. Even small modular reactors still have to prove that they can deliver on their promise affordably and at scale.

So Filipino skepticism is understandable.

Say “nuclear” and Bataan enters the room. The BNPP never operated commercially, yet arguments over its cost, safety, politics, and troubled history never really left us. We should remember those lessons. But history should warn us, not imprison us.

Considering nuclear does not mean resurrecting BNPP. We can question whether a decades-old plant should ever operate while still asking whether modern nuclear technology belongs in our future. Those are different questions, and our energy crisis is too serious to confuse them.

For me, the harder question is not nuclear. It is governance.

Yes, we live with earthquakes, typhoons, volcanoes, floods, and other natural hazards. Those risks are real. But engineering can design for extraordinary physical stresses. What worries me just as much is whether our institutions can withstand the political ones.

Can regulation remain independent when billions are involved? Can procurement stay clean? Will maintenance remain meticulous 20 or 30 years after the ribbon-cutting? Will safety standards survive changes of administration? Will highly technical positions go to the most qualified people rather than the best-connected ones? And when nobody is watching, will somebody still insist that everything be done exactly as it should?

Nuclear has little room for bahala na, puwede na, or ayusin na lang natin kapag may problema. That does not make nuclear impossible for the Philippines. It means that if we choose it, we must become good enough to deserve it. The technology will test our governance almost as much as our engineering.

Still, I do not see why energy policy must become another contest where everyone chooses a team. Nuclear versus renewables. Green versus realistic. Pro-development versus environmentalist.

Why choose?

I have raised the nuclear option in earlier columns, and I find myself returning to it again. Not because I enjoy repeating myself, but because the brownouts keep repeating themselves. Until that changes, this is a conversation worth having.

My position has also become clearer: the Philippines should seriously pursue nuclear power as part of a diversified energy future, provided we can meet the demanding standards that come with it. Not nuclear instead of renewables. Nuclear with renewables.

Build the solar farms. Harness the wind. Protect and expand geothermal. Improve transmission. Invest in storage. And begin doing the difficult groundwork now so that nuclear can eventually provide the steady power those sources cannot always provide on their own. We should not wait for another decade of brownouts before deciding that reliability matters.

Because this debate is ultimately not about loving uranium or disliking solar panels. It is about the family sweating through another powerless evening. The small business watching its goods spoil. The student looking for a place to charge a laptop. The hospital that cannot afford even a moment of uncertainty. Reliable electricity is not a luxury in a modern society. It is part of what allows it to function.

Perhaps one day I will be sitting at home in Iloilo and the electricity turning my fan will come from sunlight, geothermal steam, wind, hydro, batteries, and, yes, uranium. I probably will not know which source is doing the work at that particular moment.

Nor will I care.

I will notice only one thing: the fan is still turning.

That is the energy future I want us to build. If nuclear can help keep our lights on safely, reliably, and at a cost Filipinos can live with, then we should do more than keep it on the table.

We should be brave enough to seriously pursue it.

But if we do, we must also build something every bit as important as the reactor itself: nuclear-grade governance.

***

Doc H fondly describes himself as a ”student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.