Back to Bataan!

By following this link you'll see a very fascinating web page.

As it happens, the Philippines began construction of a Westinghouse pressurized water reactor plant at Bataan in 1976, and after what appears to have been a vast debate nationally about funding and safety, completed the plant in 1984 although the debt for it was not paid off until 2007.

No fuel was ever loaded. No steam was produced; not one watt of electricity was generated or delivered.

The plant remains intact, complete, and finished.

Now, this web page seems quite against some fairly recent proposals to fuel and start up the plant. For example, included are lists of "Major nuclear plant accidents" (not complete, not exactly accurate, and mostly not applicable to a plant such as this) and some information on Chernobyl (not applicable at all.)

Those faults notwithstanding, this is a prime example of a wide array of unfinished plants all over the world, really, and what it REALLY is, is proof of the ability of a nation to waste vast amounts of money to build something they'll probably never use because fear caused them to pull back from what they thought was a brink but was actually a new horizon. The public apparently augured disaster; we might look to the great confidence we found after the building and operating of S1W, Shippingport, Vallecitos, Dresden-1, Yankee Atomic Electric (Rowe) and a number of other early plants. We know now what both paths look like.