When Rosatom signed up in February 2011 to build two reactors for Bangladesh, nobody could have guessed that within weeks an earthquake and tsunami would wreck the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan and, with it, much of Asia's enthusiasm for nuclear energy. Fifteen and a half years on, that same Russian-built project has given Dhaka its first sustained chain reaction, and the timing says a good deal about how far the region's mood has travelled.
Unit 1 at Rooppur went critical in October, according to World Nuclear News, just three days after the national regulator signed off. The plant is Moscow's largest joint venture with Dhaka, built under a $12.65bn contract, with first concrete poured in November 2017, an operating licence granted on April 16 and 163 fuel assemblies loaded by May. Rosatom's in-house paper, Strana Rosatom, puts the power start-up at November 20 , after which output will be raised in stages before electricity reaches the grid. Bangladesh thus joins India and Pakistan as the only South Asian states running power reactors.
Across East Asia, the response to Fukushima split three ways. Japan, the country that suffered the disaster, has inched back with painful slowness. TEPCO brought unit 6 at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, the world's biggest nuclear station by installed capacity at 8.21GW, back into operation on January 21, its first restart since 2011. Even then, the planned commercial debut on March 18 was postponed after an alarm warned of a possible electrical leak in a generator. Few episodes better illustrate the stop-start character of Japan's return.
China, by contrast, never really broke stride. World Nuclear Association data now credit it with 63.98 GW of installed capacity, nudging it past France's 63 GW and leaving only the United States, at 96.9 GW, ahead. At the end of July the State Council cleared another eight units: three pairs of Hualong One reactors at Jinqimen, Taipingling and Zhuanghe, plus two Guohe One reactors at a new site in Laiyang. CNNC counts 10 Hualong One units already in commercial service and 37 more approved. On Hainan, its 125 MW Linglong One small modular reactor is undergoing pre-commissioning tests, which means the most advanced SMR in the neighbourhood is Chinese rather than one of the American designs now being marketed to Southeast Asia.
The most striking reversal, though, is in Taiwan. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) built its identity around a nuclear-free island, and the last reactor at Maanshan was taken offline on May 17 2025. The legal route back opened that same month, when the opposition Kuomintang and Taiwan People's Party used their legislative majority to permit 20-year licence extensions. In March, President Lai Ching-te pointed to the power needs of the AI boom when announcing that Taipower would seek approval to restart Maanshan and Kuosheng, and in late September the Nuclear Safety Commission completed its review of the Maanshan plan, raising the prospect of generation as early as 2028 once ageing, radiation and seismic checks are done.
The arithmetic explains the change of heart. Taiwan imports an estimated 96% of its energy, LNG supplied around 47% of its electricity last year and gas stocks cover roughly a fortnight. Yet Lai has hedged: "Even without nuclear power, Taiwan can maintain a stable electricity supply until 2032, with daily reserve margins consistently above 10%," he said. Voters will decide on November 28 whether to scrap the Nuclear-Free Homeland policy altogether, though the turnout threshold is steep, and the question of where the waste should go remains unanswered.
India, meanwhile, is betting on scale. Its 24 operating reactors amount to just under 8 GW, against a goal of 100 GW by 2047. The SHANTI bill tabled in December 2025 set out to replace the 1962 Atomic Energy Act and the 2010 nuclear liability law, and the sector has since been opened to private and foreign money. Adani now talks of up to 10 GW by 2035, Tata Power and Reliance are circling, while state-owned NPCIL and NTPC have set sights on 50 GW and 30 GW respectively.
Southeast Asia remains the region's nuclear blank space: not one country in ASEAN generates electricity from fission. The Philippines is the cautionary tale, its $2.3bn Bataan plant finished but never used. "In the last 40 years, the Philippines mothballed the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP). Not a single kilowatt-hour was used," Energy Undersecretary Rowena Cristina Guevara said in June, adding that nuclear would form part of the transition over the next four decades. Manila wants a first plant by 2032 and has asked Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power to assess whether Bataan can be salvaged. Washington's trade agency, USTDA, has committed $2.7mn to help Meralco PowerGen weigh up US SMR designs, though the energy department itself reckons such reactors will not be commercially viable worldwide before 2040.
Thailand has gone down a similar path. In September the state utility EGAT signed a USTDA-funded feasibility study into SMRs totalling about 600 MW, comparing designs from seven American vendors, building on an earlier exchange agreement with KHNP. Indonesia is more ambitious still, planning its first plant for 2032 to 2034, an initial 500 MW tranche and 44 GW by 2060, with small reactors as the preferred technology for a scattered archipelago. "SMR technology suits Indonesia’s decentralised industrial clusters and supports the growth of the blue economy across our islands," said Dadan Kusdiana, secretary-general of the National Energy Council.
Vietnam has chosen the conventional route. In March, Hanoi and Moscow signed an intergovernmental deal for Ninh Thuan 1, two VVER-1200 units, reviving a scheme approved in 2009 and shelved in 2016 on cost grounds, with the government aiming to finish both Ninh Thuan plants by the end of 2030. Singapore, short of land, is studying the regulatory groundwork for SMRs.
What ties all this together is less a change of heart about safety than a hard look at supply. The disruption to Gulf shipping this year has exposed every LNG importer in the region, while data centres and chip fabs demand round-the-clock power that wind and sun cannot yet guarantee. The supplier map has become a geopolitical one too: Russian large reactors for Dhaka and Hanoi, American SMR studies in Manila and Bangkok, Korean engineers at Bataan and a Chinese programme that answers to no one but Beijing. The open question is whether the newcomers can actually deliver. Rooppur took the better part of a decade from first concrete to criticality, and the small reactors Southeast Asia is courting have yet to prove themselves commercially anywhere. Fifteen years after Fukushima, Asia's nuclear ambition is no longer in doubt; its timetable very much is.
No comments:
Post a Comment