The nuclear pitch deserves better numbers than this

Rep. Mark Cojuangco came to Iloilo last week selling nuclear power, and he brought a number with him: PHP 5.50 per kilowatt-hour, which he says Vietnamese households enjoy because of nuclear energy.

Vietnam has no nuclear plant. Not one. Its grid runs on coal, hydro, and a fast-growing solar fleet, and households there paid roughly 1,956 Vietnamese dongs — about USD 0.074, or a little over PHP 4 — per kilowatt-hour as of last year. So the cheap power is real. The nuclear part is invented. Hanoi signed its reactor deal with Russia only this March, and even the optimists in that program do not expect a working unit before 2030.

Why does one bad statistic matter so much? Because we are the perfect audience for a bad pitch. Ilonggos are paying PHP 11 to PHP 14 per kilowatt-hour and bracing for another increase. We sat in the dark for four days in January 2024. Load dropping since mid-May has hit millions of customers in the Visayas region. People this tired of brownouts will believe almost anything that promises relief, and a congressman who chairs the House committee on nuclear energy knows it. That is exactly why his facts need to be airtight. When the flagship number is fiction, everything behind it starts to smell.

Then came the sales pressure. “You have to go first. If you don’t, Cebu will go first.” With respect — a nuclear plant is a 60-year commitment involving spent-fuel storage, evacuation planning, and a regulator, Philippine Atomic Energy Regulatory Authority (PhilATOM), that is barely 10 months old and has yet to license anything. You do not make that decision the way you grab the last seat on a jeepney.

And nobody should pretend a reactor fixes the outages we have now. Even on a heroic timeline, Panay sees no nuclear electron before the mid-2030s. Georgia’s Vogtle plant, America’s newest, was promised at USD 14 billion and delivered at roughly USD 35 billion, seven years late. The near-term conversation — reserves, transmission, our tail-end position on the national grid — is less glamorous, which is probably why it keeps getting skipped.

Here is the strange part. Cojuangco’s strongest argument was the one he spent the least time on. Fuel money leaves the country; salary money stays. His figures — USD 20 million a year for uranium against USD 350 million to 450 million for imported coal, plus 1,000 permanent jobs — deserve scrutiny too, but the logic is sound. Except no Philippine university currently offers a nuclear engineering degree. UP graduated its last cohort in 1984, the year Bataan was completed and never switched on. Meralco has managed to send 12 scholars abroad since 2024. Twelve.

If Western Visayas ever hosts a plant, the thousand jobs will go to whoever trained for them. So our counter-offer to the congressman: fund nuclear science scholarships at UPV and WVSU now, fix the grid we have, and come back with numbers that survive a Google search. We are open to nuclear power. We are not open to being hustled into it.