The United States has secured a key victory in the ongoing geopolitical chess game in the waters around China. On Tuesday, July 09, the US State Department made an announcement stating that a landmark agreement with the government of the Philippines has gone into effect. America will now begin exporting peaceful nuclear technology to its former colony.
This enhanced cooperation between the Philippines and its former Imperial overlord materializes at a time when China has been using its military to push the Philippines back and claim its territory, despite several rulings and stern statements from the international court system.
The new nuclear cooperation pact, which the Philippines signed at a diplomatic event in San Francisco during November 2023, is informally known as the “123 Agreement” and formally titled the “Agreement for Cooperation Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy.” According to the agreement, technological transfers would be allowed to begin by the second of July, 2024.
Raphael Lotilla, the Philippine Energy Secretary, made a statement at the time of signing explaining that the agreement would allow for the transfer of expertise and information, equipment, components, and nuclear material both directly between the two governments and also through intermediaries who have been authorized by the relevant authorities. These transfers will allow and expedite the development of nuclear power plants enabled, and potentially operated, by American companies.
This agreement could mark a turning point in the historically fickle relationship that the Philippine government has had with nuclear power. In the late 1970s, the authoritarian President Ferdinand Marcos’s government built its first nuclear power plant, but the facility was abandoned before it was ever fueled in response tor the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine.
Then, in 2022, some of the fuel that had originally been intended for that reactor was, despite its 30 year age, loaded into a research reactor that was never intended to go online. The aged fuel rods worked so well that the system is still functioning in July of 2024.