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.
Instead, he did what his father and generations before him had done: Arquero farmed.
The land here, in this region on the north side of the Bay of Manila — a place whose name is most often associated with the Bataan Death March, during which Japanese troops slaughtered thousands of Allied prisoners of war — is too parched and mountainous for rice paddies. So he grew squash and melons. As a pipefitter, Arquero made the equivalent of over $420 per day. These days, he said, he’s lucky to pull in $6.
This isn’t his father’s Philippines. It’s hotter. The droughts last longer. The produce grows smaller or withers on the vine. The insects are relentless. The pesticide costs more.
“It’s becoming harder and harder to grow,” Arquero said. “We’re harvesting less because there hasn’t been any rain for months.”
It’s also getting harder to stay cool. Like many here, Arquero can’t afford his own air conditioner. Even if he could, he said, using it would be too expensive. Mostly dependent on imported fossil fuels to run power plants, Filipinos pay among the highest electricity prices in Southeast Asia, and rates keepgoingup. With tuition bills coming due soon for his four kids, ages 15 to 23, he said he’s trapped in a cycle of debt.
“There’s no money,” Arquero said. “I borrow money from others. When my salary comes I pay them back, then I borrow again.”
The dizzying pull of a debt spiral is enough to make anyone lose themselves, at least briefly, in aching hindsight. What if things had gone the opposite way? What if the Philippines had completed and actually used Southeast Asia’s first nuclear plant?
Arquero might still find out.
The Rise of Nuclear Fear
As much as proponents of bringing Bataan online would like to rewind to 1986 — and even that feels possible with another Marcos, the democratically-elected “Bongbong,” in power — there’s no turning back the clock. The plant, weathered by the sea, has been sitting idle for 38 years, though it still receives nearly $1 million a year in basic maintenance.
But the planet’s literal and political heating-up over the past few years has thawed old fears of nuclear power. The Philippines is now racing against Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia to claim its place as the first in this region to join the 30-plus others around the world that use atomic energy. With only limited engagement from Washington, however, Manila has remained open to almost any country ready to help.
After passing two laws to boost nuclear power, the Philippine Congress is considering voting on another two pieces of legislation later this year aimed at setting up a modern atomic energy regulator and offering subsidies to developers. A handful of major U.S. reactor startups are already in talks with Filipino officials. Russian and Korean nuclear engineers have made visits to Bataan to assess whether or how quickly that plant could be revived. A new Korean delegation arrived in October. In December, a team from Canada paid a visit.
The Koreans returned recently to thoroughly inspect and come up with a price and schedule for restarting Bataan. The Korean team’s previous estimates suggested updated the plant with new equipment would have cost over $2 billion and taken five years — a relative bargain compared to the cost of adding new reactors to the facility, which could add up to between $5 billion and $10 billion each.
No one has come from the U.S. government yet — and whether the new Trump administration, which seems laser-focused on increasing U.S. exports of fossil fuels over all other energy sources, will makeFilipino nuclear power a priority remains an open question.
Nor has the Westinghouse Electric Company ― the once-iconic American nuclear giant that has since passed between a variety of owners in Britain, Japan, and Canada ― made Bataan’s reactor and has since fallen into financial trouble, expressed much interest in restoring it. But the company’s leadership changed in recent weeks, and the firm brokered a deal to end a longstanding intellectual property dispute with one of South Korea’s main nuclear companies, opening the door to possibly working together in Bataan.
“In the 1980s, we were afraid about the effects. I’m still afraid. It’s an old structure. I’m not sure if the equipment is still working. I’m worried about a radiation accident.”
– Jaime Aquino, 42, a local council member at the nearby village of Sabang
That’s an alarming development for Jaime Aquino, 42, a local council member at the nearby village, or barangay, of Sabang.
“In the 1980s, we were afraid about the effects,” he told me in a fan-cooled room of Sabang’stown hall. “I’m still afraid. It’s an old structure. I’m not sure if the equipment is still working. I’m worried about a radiation accident.”
It’s a reasonable concern. While the civilian nuclear industry has suffered just three major accidents in the 71 years since the first atomic generating station launched, the most recent one took place in Japan, a country most Filipinos view positively.
The Philippines is no stranger to industrial accidents from its current energy sources. Oil tankers that sank in 2023 and 2024 spilled hundreds of thousands of crude into waterways and fisheries on which Filipinos depend. The Philippines has spent millions to maintain the mothballed Bataan, but the aging equipment has sat for decades on a salt-sprayed peninsula of a humid jungle.
Aquino is not alone, either. Fears of nuclear energy trace back to before commercial fission reactors even existed, when science fiction writers wove the nascent discoveries about the awesome power of atoms into the fabric of popular comic strips and stories. That fission debuted on the world stage as mushroom cloud explosions over Japan and not as a highly efficient source of electricity only cemented the sense that otherworldly terror should trump any wonder.
In 1953, then-President Dwight Eisenhower gave his famous “Atoms for Peace” speech, in which he pledged to unite the world with the cheap, plentiful energy nuclear fission could produce. The Philippines became one of the first countries in the world to follow the U.S. by launching a nuclear energy program. The idea was to work with Washington on nuclear power, only ten years after the Philippines — a former American colony seized along with Puerto Rico and Guam in the Spanish-American War of 1898 — received its independence.
While nuclear weapons have not been used in war since 1945, the U.S., France and the Soviet Union would spend much of the two decades after World War II setting off atomic weapons in the Pacific with little regard for the effects of bomb residue on the millions of people who lived in the region. It wasn’t a far leap for anyone to ask: Why would the powers that be operate an energy reactor any more safely?
The lines between the public’s fears of danger of atomic power and the real-life risks continued to blur. On March 16, 1979, “The China Syndrome,” a Hollywood thriller starring Jane Fonda as a reporter who exposes the coverup of a dangerous nuclear energy accident, debuted in theaters. Twelve days later, a reactor partially melted down at the nuclear plant on Three Mile Island, at that point the worst such accident anywhere in the world. Though some more recent research has found evidence of a spike in thyroid disease in the affected area, repeated studies have failed to definitively identify any illness from the radiation released that day, and the regulatory changes that followed significantly improved the efficiency of the U.S. nuclear fleet. Construction work on the Bataan plant, by then three years in, continued.
It wasn’t until Chernobyl that global opinion started to really turn. The Soviets had been testing a novel and inherently unstable type of reactor, lacking something all modern plants now have: a concrete dome. The design wasn’t the only problem: Historians say the authoritarian Soviet system’s push for results also disincentivized reporting safety concerns up the chain of command. The effect was a disaster that spread radiation over nearly 60,000 square miles of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. The World Health Organization estimated in 2005 that as many as 4,000 people may end up dying of radiation exposure, but other, more debated projections suggest the death toll could eventually top 100,000.
After the fall of Marcos, Bataan’s days looked numbered. As was the case in Taiwan’s pro-democracy movement, the forces who restored the Philippines’ democracy associated the controversial megaproject with the authoritarian who started it. Upon taking office in 1986, elected President Maria Corazon Aquino quickly canceled Bataan, sending back the fuel to the U.S. and leaving the incomplete plant on permanent standby.
Across the world, Chernobyl slowed the buildout of nuclear reactors — particularly in democratic countries, where campaigners made power plants a focus of anti-bomb protests. But nuclear power looked poised for a renaissance in the early 2000s, as global climate negotiations to curb fossil fuel emissions gained momentum, putting a new premium on finding efficient and abundant sources of zero-carbon power. The U.S. made plans for dozens of new reactors, with Westinghouse pitching its new AP-1000 – a third-generation unit with a replicable design and state-of-the-art safety features that shrink any possibility of human error — as the American workhorse. The Philippines began looking into completing Bataan.
Then, in March 2011, a tsunami struck a series of nuclear power plants along Japan’s northeast coast. Most were fine, but the nuclear station in Fukushima had gotten a pass from regulators to keep its back-up generators at a much lower elevation than Japanese rules required. The wave flooded the generators, disabling the power systems needed to avoid a meltdown. While no one is confirmed to have died directly from radiation exposure, stress caused by the mandatory evacuation contributed to the deaths of hundreds of mostly elderly residents who lived near the plant. Recent studies on livestock left alive in the irradiated exclusion zone around the defunct plant show no uptick in the diseases that current radiation regulations suggest would be common after the exposure from the plant.
The Fukushima meltdown put the kibosh on the growing push to finish Bataan.
Over the intervening years, however, the Philippines’ economy grew rapidly. With that growth came new demand for energy to power new factories and Internet servers. Total energy consumption in the Philippines surged nearly 60% from 2011 to 2023.
Faced with record demand in 2022, then-President Rodrigo Duterte signed an executive order directing an inter-agency panel in his government to study the possibility of opening Bataan. The move came just six months before Duterte reached the end of his presidency in a country that, in the wake of Marcos’ dictatorship, limited the elected head of state to a single term.
The former dictator’s namesake son won the May 2022 presidential election in a landslide. While hesitant to support the Bataan project, since critics had linked it to his father, Marcos said his team started “already talking about” nuclear power “even before I took office.”
He was far from alone. Just months before the election, Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. Kyiv’s democratic allies sanctioned the Kremlin’s exports of gas and oil and tried to rewire their supply chains, but Western Europe soon faced an energy crisis. As the limits of what renewables like wind and solar could do to replace fossil fuels became clearer, country after country announced plans to either halt the phase-out of nuclear power, expand their fleets of atomic power stations or even build their first reactors.
Marcos touted “cutting-edge” technologies in the U.S. and Europe that could fit into the Philippines energy mix. He was particularly interested in the smaller, lower-powered modular reactors that many in the industry in the west believe can bring down nuclear construction costs.
“When it comes to power, we’re open to everything. Anything we can get to add to our power supply,” Marcos told local media in May 2023. “Of course, we always think that we need more renewables, less fossil fuels.”
Nuclear power has been becoming politically popular. A 2023 poll of 20 countries by the consultancy Radiant Energy found that the Philippines ranked fifth for the highest levels of support for atomic energy, with 52% of the country favoring the use of nuclear power, and only 25% opposing it. In the latest annual poll, due out in the coming weeks but shared in advance with HuffPost, Filipino support for using nuclear power rose 69%, with 46% in support of building new reactors.
If any single person is responsible for keeping the dream of Philippine atomic energy alive, it’s Mark Cojuangco. A hulking man with a cheerful face and thick sweep of feathered-back graying hair, Cojuangco is a national lawmaker in the Philippines’ House of Representatives and the scion of one of the country’s powerful political clans.
He took up the cause of nuclear power in 2007, becoming the government’s go-to proselytizer and leading regular tours of Bataan in hopes of generating support for the plant. Since the global pro-nuclear movement began gaining gained steam in recent years, Cojuangco has become a fixture of debates on X, formerly Twitter, and at the United Nations climate summit and other events.
On an overcast and steamy morning in Manila, we met at an airstrip and I climbed into the back of his three-passenger helicopter, branded with his name for campaign purposes.
We took off and immediately headed for the coast, flying roughly half an hour across Manila Bay. The view was stunning. Behind us, Metro Manila, with its sprawling skyline and traffic-clogged streets filled with brightly-painted jeepneys, spilled out into the bay. Dredging ships piled sand and rocks onto the landfilled areas being reclaimed to further expand the megacity.
The name Manila, I learned later on my trip, comes from a Tagalog phrase meaning “there are water hyacinth flowers found here.” From up high, I could see cargo ships, gas tankers, fishing boats, a lot of plastic junk and some bloomless seaweed.
Across the bay, a more modest industrial skyline appeared. A single fossil fuel plant flared gas from a smoke stack, its bright orange flame visible from miles away. Coal-fired power plants ringed the shore, with new ones under construction. After passing over land for about 10 minutes, the Bataan plant appeared from between green volcanic hills. From the air, it looked like a brutalist landmark, a giant concrete box on a craggy peninsular cliff facing the sea.
On the ground, the facility looked even bigger. It was well-kept, with lush, flowering gardens, mango trees (from which Cojuangco treats sometimes hesitant visitors to fruit) and neatly mowed lawns.
Inside, the plant was almost eerie. Briny air and jungle heat had rusted chains and chipped paint. Without anyone there to need lighting or cooling, big areas remained dim and hot. The reactor pool, typically aglow with the radiation from spent fuel rods in active nuclear plants I’ve visited in other countries, was dark and cavernous. The control room looked like something frozen in the past, with its ante-digital instruments of knobs and dial. Black starlings had taken up nesting in the yawning eaves of the turbine room, where steam generated from applying the heat of split atoms to ocean water would have spun generators to produce electricity.
When the Russians came in October 2017, officials from the state-owned nuclear giant Rosatom said reviving the facility was impossible.
But as Cojangco led a tour of local students and nearby town officials through the plant, switching — as most Filipinos do — between English and Tagalog, he was beaming with excitement about the potential.
“Look at the quality of the workmanship,” he said, pointing to structures in the plant. “I challenge you to find welding as [good as] this in the entire Philippines. This plant is better built than plants built in America.”
Not only could he envision this very system being refurbished and coming online, he hoped he could complete its final mission: to expand with more reactors. His dream was to build an AP-1000, the leading American technology sought after by the Chinese and Europeans.
But he also wanted to make this corner of the Philippines a hub for building and ultimately exporting those U.S. reactors throughout Asia.
Back in the helicopter, Cojuangco directed the pilot to fly west, away from Manila, to the other side of the Bataan peninsula. There was Subic Bay, where the U.S. operated a major naval base from 1901 to 1992. Having the U.S. military so close by was part of the calculus when the government originally sited Bataan in the 1970s.
Now, however, Cojuangco saw a different advantage. Across the bay from the former military airfield and docks stood a private shipyard that had fallen out of use as shipbuilding in the region shifted to China and South Korea.
“Look how close it is,” Cojuangco said over the helicopter headphones. “It’s a perfect location for a factory.”
Cojuanco had a multi-part vision. If everything went his way, the Philippines would renovate the reactor at Bataan, then expand the plant with a second unit. That additional reactor, he hoped, would be an AP-1000. Perhaps Westinghouse would then agree to open a factory right here in Subic Bay to manufacture components for building more AP-1000s. The shipyard, he said, would make for a perfect location to easily load the parts onto ships for delivery to Thailand, Vietnam and any other nation now angling to go nuclear.
It would put the Philippines and the U.S. in direct competition with China, which has been building its own AP-1000s so successfully that the Americans followed advice from their Chinese counterparts when building some recent reactors in Georgia.
Logical as it may sound, the plan has some obvious flaws. First, there’s the lack of interest from Westinghouse, which has struggled to build its own new reactors in the U.S. The company is inching forward with its first major export project in years, a set of AP-1000s in northern Poland that will become that country’s first nuclear plant.
Both the Trump and Biden administrations offered billions of dollars to support the project in Poland. Yet U.S. officials who spoke to HuffPost on condition of anonymity to openly discuss a sensitive issue said Manila still seemed like an unreliable partner compared to Warsaw. Unlike Poland, whose polarized political system has nevertheless consistently yielded governments with strong support for Washington, the Filipino relationship with the U.S. has seesawed in recent years, with Duterte hewing closer to China and criticizing the Americans for past colonial brutality.
Perhaps more importantly, the U.S. officials said, the Philippines can’t seem to decide what kind of nuclear project it wants. While Cojuangco dreams of an AP-1000 and believes his country should not be a testing ground for technologies that have yet to be built elsewhere, the highest-profile deal the Philippines has yet brokered was with an American startup, Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, which had hoped to debut its small modular reactor design there. In October, the Tennessee-based company filed for bankruptcy.
There’s also the problem of the grid. The Bataan plant has a high-voltage transmission line connecting the facility to the larger power system, but the line was only designed to distribute about 500 megawatts of electricity. That’s a good match for the existing reactor at Bataan, but accounts for less than half the output of an AP-1000, meaning expanding the facility would also require building more transmission linecapacity.
The companies and wealthy families that control the Philippines power distribution networks also import coal and natural gas for existing fossil fuel plants, disincentivizing them from supporting nuclear power.
Then there’s the issue of how to pay for it. Nuclear power fell out of favor in the Western world in part because reactors take so long to build. The workforces who constructed the original plants from the 1960s through the 1980s have largely retired, and — when new the timelines for new projects stretch further out — interest payments pile up into the billions of dollars.
The Philippines has little time to spare. With electricity demand growing rapidly, the obvious answer is to go with renewables, among the cheapest and quickest options around. But no major economy has yet switched its energy system over to solar and wind alone. And the Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands, has relatively little of the flat, open land needed for panels or turbines. Compared to all other major sources of electricity, both renewable and fossil, nuclear power uses by far the least amount of land per unit of power produced. Solar farms use on average more than 63 times more land than nuclear. Individual windmills on land take up minimal space, but arraying multiple turbines requires significant space between each unit.
Then there’s the issue of storage. Battery prices are coming down, but as anyone who has ever seen a phone battery deplete even when it’s not in use knows, lithium-ion packs don’t hold a charge for very long. New technologies are developing that could help solve that problem, but either way, the shifting output from renewables means they’re difficult to depend on for 24/7 power.
As a result, the buildout of solar and wind in most countries has come with an expansion of gas or coal plants to make up the difference. Since the Philippines has little of its own fossil fuel reserves, the country depends on imports for more than half its energy use.
It’s expensive. It’s also an Achilles heel. As tensions have grown with Beijing over China’s claims to Filipino waters and Manila has strengthened ties with the U.S. military and Taiwan, the Chinese coast guard has started ramming into Philippine ships. While that hasn’t extended to cargo ships, relying entirely on imported fuels makes the Philippines vulnerable to blockade at a time when Russia has demonstrated the effectiveness of cutting off energy as a weapon of war in Ukraine.
A nuclear plant, by contrast, can run for years on end with refueling. And while the upfront construction costs can climb into the billions of dollars, nuclear stations are cheap to run and can last for well over half a century, allowing the price to be amortized over decades.
The Philippines doesn’t produce its own uranium, so keeping a nuclear plant fueled would require importing enriched metal from abroad. But it might not always be that way.
On a sunny morning back in Manila, I visited the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute, the government science agency set up in the 1950s in response to Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech.
In her laboratory at the massive research facility in the center of the capital, scientist Celine Grace Causapin is working on developing methods to extract uranium from seawater. Researchers in China, Japan and the U.S. have all looked into harvesting the metal from the oceans. But Causapin pioneered a new method using polypropylene fabric, modified with radiation, to absorb as much as 98% of uranium in each seawater sample. In theory, extracting uranium from water costs far more than simply mining the metal in places such as Canada, Kazakhstan and Niger. But the absorbent fabric she developed can be reused multiple times.
“So far, we have tested five cycles in the lab, and the efficacy of the fabric never fell below 90%,” she said.
Seawater isn’t the only potential local source of nuclear fuel. Another scientist on her team partnered with the biggest phosphate producer in the country to develop a method of extracting uranium from fertilizer waste.
“Raw phosphoric acid has contaminants, we extract from that,” said Botvinnik Palattao, the researcher. “It’s going from a contaminant to a power source.”
The scientists at PNRI aren’t just focused on nuclear power, either. In an illustration of another benefit of pursuing a civilian atomic energy program, PNRI is also working on new methods for tracking pollution in groundwater; decontaminating spices and produce without toxic chemicals; and permanently decomposing the non-biodegradable plastic waste that litters Filipino land and clogs waterways.
Yet the agency is strapped for funding. In the bathrooms at the headquarters, lights turned off automatically and signs in English and Taglog demanded that the switches stay that way, lest the building run up an even higher electricity bill. It’s also dogged by its own invisibility to the public.
Over and over again, I heard Filipinos ask: Can the Philippines really do this? It’s a kind of thinking that’s common in formerly colonized countries, where a belief that the native talent is insufficient to achieve technological feats associated with rich imperial powers.
That may make the biggest accomplishment at PNRI that much more remarkable — the reactor Filipinos built themselves.
In the center of the facility is an egg-like dome containing the Philippines’ lone working reactor, a research unit designed by the PNRI team.
During a tour of the reactor, I asked Ryan Olivares, the head of reactor operations, what advantage came with constructing the unit without help from abroad. He smiled.
“We did it to be cheap,” he said.
It’s a sign of what’s possible. But the Philippines has a long way to go to prepare its nuclear energy workforce again. The University of the Philippines, the country’s premier college, is considering restraining its nuclear engineering course, but currently has nothing on offer.
“I feel bad for the country, personally,” said Antonio Corpuz, 76, the former plant manager at Bataan. “We know it would have saved us from a lot of misery.”
Corpuz was among a cohort of Filipinos who trained as nuclear operators under U.S. Navy engineers in the late 1970s, only for their skills to be made irrelevant when the plant was canceled. As is often the case in a country whose main export is workers who go abroad, many of the Filipino engineers decamped to Canada, Europe and the U.S. to help build nuclear power stations there.
“One of the biggest disappointments,” said Santos Quizana, 72, one of the other engineers who trained alongside Corpuz, “is that since the mothballing, no one is using us to educate the public. That’s the most important thing, to educate the people.”
Instead, Corpuz said, successive governments in the Philippines drummed up fear over the plant for what he described as political reasons, largely to express opposition to the former Marcos regime.
“We are the victims,” he said. “It’s all political, when we should be practical.”
Yet the government’s newfound pragmatism on nuclear power is hardly enough to change the fate for Bataan, Corpuz said.
“If it opens in my lifetime,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “then that means I will live long.”
If powering on Bataan isn’t possible, there is another option for placing a nuclear plant in the Philippines.
Roughly six hours north of Manila, the coastal town of Labrador sits at the mouth of the Lingayen Gulf, on ground high enough to avoid flooding during a storm. Unlike Bataan, this municipality with a population of about 27,000 is within Cojuangco’s congressional district.
After years of holding rallies and local forums with Mayor Ernesto Acain, an engineer himself, Cojuangco helped organize a local petition drive in 2022 to test voters’ support for building a nuclear plant in the area. The effect became a referendum of sorts, with enough notarized signatures to show a majority of the town approved of the plan, lured in part by the promise of reliable, free electricity from the facility. The petition is still ongoing.
“We’re mostly fishermen and farmers here, but most go abroad or to Manila for employment,” Acain told me in his office in the town hall. With free, carbon-free electricity, he said, “maybe manufacturing or other companies will come here.”
Just a tiny share of the total output of a reactor would be enough meet the town’s needs.
He said between 50 and 100 families would need to be moved to make way for a power plant. The location has issues — there’s a highway between it and the ocean — but the mayor said that could be traversed with an overpass or an underground tunnel, and promised that any displaced farmers would be compensated and given new land.
At a roadside market in the middle of town, the midday heat was blazing — dangerously, without shade or cooling. While heat-related fatalities are notoriously undercounted worldwide as the planet’s temperatures rise, the Philippines had at the start of this year linked at least seven deaths to a heat wave. Official statistics in most countries might fail to capture the extent to which extreme heat is killing people, but studies show a higher risk of heat sickness in cities, where concrete and asphalt can turn streets into ovens. With more than half its population already living in cities, the Philippines is among the fastest-urbanizing countries in Asia.
Standing under the shade of a tree on the side of the road, Cherry Yaneza, 53, blasted her face with a battery-powered fan.
She said the idea of a nuclear plant is “a little bit scary.”
’I’m an average person,” she said. “For the average person, the idea of nuclear is that, I’m not sure, maybe it will hurt us.”
Still, she he admitted the cost of electricity has been brutal. There are few good jobs. Anyone who’s wanted a real opportunity to get ahead has had to go overseas for work, she said.
“I can’t just go away. I have children. I have grandchildren. I can’t get other people to take care of my kids to go away and look for money,” she said. “We have to figure it out here.”
At a food stall selling snacks and umbrellas, Edna Janga, 54, sprawled out in a plastic chair under a blue tarp. Recent years have been a disaster for her. She’s trapped in a cycle of debt, and cannot afford to take a day off. It’s taking a toll on her body. She has heart disease and high blood pressure, and on hot days like this she said she can hardly think straight.
Asked about the possibility of a nuclear plant, however, she responded without hesitation: “I’m scared.”
“I have a nervous breakdown when I think of it,” she said in Tagalog, gesticulating with both her hands open. She then paused and looked upward, visibly debating how to phrase what she meant.
“I just have a feeling of nervousness,” she said.
“But in the heat,” she added. “I can’t even breathe.”
Reporting for this story was partly funded by the East-West Center’s Melvin M.S. Goo Writing Fellowship. For more on this story, sign up here for a virtual seminar the author will give on Thursday, Feb. 13 at 5 p.m. EST, and subscribe to his newsletter.