The State Department announced on Tuesday that a landmark nuclear cooperation agreement has gone into effect, allowing the U.S. to export peaceful nuclear technology to the Philippines.
This closer cooperation between America and the Philippines comes at a moment when China is using force to bully the Philippines out of its own territory, in flagrant defiance of international court rulings.
The Philippines signed the nuclear cooperation pact, known as the Agreement for Cooperation Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy or the “123 Agreement,” at a meeting in San Francisco in November 2023. The agreement stipulated that technology transfers could begin on July 2, 2024.
“The 123 Agreement will pave the way for the transfer of information and expertise, nuclear material, equipment, and components directly between the Philippines and the U.S. or through persons authorized by their respective authorities to engage in transfer activities, which will support potential nuclear power projects with U.S. providers,” Philippine Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla said when the agreement was signed.
The Philippines has a fitful relationship with nuclear power. Its first nuclear plant was constructed in the late 1970s under authoritarian President Ferdinand Marcos but abandoned in 1986 after Russia’s Chernobyl disaster, without nuclear fuel ever being loaded into the reactor.
In 2022, some of the 30-year-old fuel intended for the original reactor was dropped into a new research reactor that was not intended to become fully operational. The old fuel rods seem to be working properly as of July.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announced soon after taking office that “it is time to re-examine our strategy toward building nuclear power plants.”
Marcos Jr. spoke of using new technology that allows “smaller scale, modular nuclear plants,” which would be designed in full compliance with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regulations, which were tightened after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster. However, his first idea for revitalizing Philippine nuclear power was to finish the Bataan plant started by his father.
This has been a controversial proposal in the Philippines since the Bataan reactor had a troubled history of design flaws and potential hazards before the Chernobyl disaster convinced the government under Marcos Sr. to give up. Still, the Philippines is currently reliant on coal for its energy needs, and there is a growing conviction– both in Manila and other capitals around the world — that nuclear power is the only way to provide enough power with fewer emissions.
Philippine congressman Mark Cojuangco, an enthusiastic supporter of bringing the Bataan plant online, told the BBC in March 2023 that the facility was constructed to higher standards in certain respects than American plants of the 1970s, it has not really “aged” because it was never brought online and it has been well-maintained over the past three decades.
“People always use the analogy of cars or motorcycles. But the mode of ageing of a nuclear reactor is from neutron bombardment. So far, this reactor has had none, so effectively it’s brand new,” Cojuangco said when his BBC interviewer said the control room of the reactor looked like a museum of obsolete electronics technology.
China is muscling the Philippines out of its own South China Sea territory, foreclosing the possibility of developing offshore gas and oil resources. On Tuesday, China’s state-run Global Times sneeringly dismissed Philippine concerns that China’s illegal construction and naval activities are damaging the marine environment in the disputed Spratly Islands. Instead, the Chinese Communist regime accused the Philippines of damaging the environment by using an ancient grounded ship as a tiny military outpost on the Second Thomas Shoal.
“The Philippines cannot even provide a single example in their statement of how they have safely disposed of the daily accumulation of waste and garbage from their personnel stationed on the grounded vessel,” the Global Times growled.
Chinese “experts” insisted Beijing has every right to develop artificial islands and reefs within its “sovereignty,” which is incorrect — China’s claims to the region were decisively rejected by a landmark international tribunal ruling in 2016, which affirmed Philippine sovereignty over the area. China simply ignored the ruling and used increasing amounts of force to push the Filipinos out of their own territory and that process now seems irreversible absent a major military confrontation.
The Global Times threw in allegations that its “reporters” discovered “illegal sales of rare species such as giant clams” in the Philippine black market, along with “endangered humphead wrasse from the South China Sea” openly sold in Manila fish markets. The notion of China’s rapacious Communist tyranny posing as defenders of the environment is ludicrous, but it sends a strong signal that the Filipinos had better write off the territories China seized by force.
The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday that the 123 Agreements are “part of broader U.S. efforts to develop the Philippines’ civil nuclear sector, creating a safe, secure and modern sector that requires a skilled workforce, robust regulations and strong commercial partnerships.”
“Energy security is an increasingly critical global challenge requiring deliberate collaborative efforts and together, our two countries can make a significant contribution to our shared clean energy goals,” the State Department said, endorsing nuclear power as a clean energy solution and committing the United States to help the Philippines develop it.
The Philippines gets much of its coal from Indonesia and, with China thwarting other avenues of serious clean energy development — Manila is not about to bet its industrial future on frivolities like solar panels and windmills — nuclear is the only serious path to energy independence. Nearly four decades after the Bataan project was abandoned, President Marcos Jr. might be about to prove that his father was right about nuclear energy all along.
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