Anyone seasoned in the trenches of the Philippine energy sector knows damn well that no law with decades-long consequences for the country and Filipino consumers gets slammed through a day of Congressional cocktail. Just ask the framers of the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA) and the Renewable Energy Act – laws that battled through years of blood, sweat, tears, and floor debates before securing a majority of legislators’ votes.

Decades later, even these fire-tested laws, despite being crafted with exhaustive deliberations, were still exposed for their flaws and had to be patched up with a slew of supplementary rules as some core components of the industry demanded tougher, smarter regulatory frameworks.

But just last week, what came crashing into the scene was the Philippine Atomic Energy Regulatory Authority (PhilAtom) bill, which blasted through the Senate floors with roughly zero questions and resistance, rubber-stamped by both Houses in a single day, and propped by a threadbare paper bicam that looked more like a legislative afterthought than a safeguard. This left anyone with a deep sense of national safety asking: did they even read the words “safety” and “regulation,” or did they just skim straight to “atomic” and call it a day?

Every market with nuclear facilities drums one word like a war chant: safety, SAFETY, S-A-F-E-T-Y; and that’s carved in stone. Then it’s also the first gospel they preach to any country chasing the atom. So, in all bluntness, what part of ‘safety’ are we still fumbling over here in the Philippines?

Somehow, lawmakers and policy leaders need to wake up to this hard truth: without ironclad nuclear safety regulation, you're not steering a future-proof energy industry – you're wiring a global time bomb with shaky hands. And if we’re not being careful with our own process of safety regulation, what’s clear is that when a nuclear plant blows, the fallout doesn’t respect borders.

So if one country slacks on safety, everyone with this technology deployment in the world pays the price. That’s why international standards, primarily those of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), are pushed so hard, and they serve as solid survival protocols. On that tenet, any country shouldn’t be given a free pass – even those from the developing world like the Philippines – to rush half-baked laws when the risk on the table will have global implications. Because if you can’t even show backbone in shaping policies, don’t expect anyone to take you seriously when it comes to cracking down on safety enforcement.

Don’t get me wrong here: nuclear power is certainly an unavoidable technology in the evolving energy game, especially as the world fights the devastating impact of climate change – and I’m all in on that. Nuclear isn’t just a solid baseload contender with costs dropping over decades; its carbon footprint would also be practically a whisper next to those choking thermal plants. The future demands it, whether we’re ready or not.

But then again, this should be etched at the top of every policymaker’s mind: nuclear regulation isn’t just about preventing accidents – it’s about enforcing a culture of engineering excellence, operational transparency, as well as zero-excuses accountability. It demands that governments and industry players not only build airtight rules but stress-test every inch of a technology deployment; plan like lives depend on it – because they do. And please, no cutting corners!

When the media started breaking the news about the bill’s passage, many people in the energy sector were left scratching their heads – with some of them not even oriented with what PhilAtom is. Then, after dissecting the bill’s provisions, the verdict came clear: the bill is peppered with many motherhood statements, a patchwork of vague rules pretending to chart the course for the Philippines’ nuclear comeback. That’s a flashing warning sign – and it became manifest that the legislation was hammered out without an extensive information and education campaign, even among the industry players who will also carry the weight of the nation’s nuclear future.

Digging further into the bicam report, tough questions hit hard: PhilAtom is set to call the shots on nuclear plant siting – but what exactly does that leave for the DOE, the agency tasked with keeping the country’s power supply reliable? And how are they supposed to sync up with NGCP or the system operator to actually get their plant capacities wheeled into the grid? Grid integration is already a tangled nightmare for the Philippine power sector; don’t make things worse by bungling coordination on where to install those nuclear power plants.

Aside from PhilAtom’s criteria, isn’t it obvious that siting has to be locked in with DOE, so these plants land exactly where the power demand is needed – right at the load centers? This isn’t just a detail; nuclear planning has to run from cradle to grave. Are we really supposed to sit here guessing how this crucial middle ground gets managed? PhilAtom might argue that its sphere of regulation only delves with safety – but the point is: safety spans the whole supply chain – that means siting can’t be done as a separate scramble – it has to be locked down and coordinated right from day one.

The bill similarly hands PhilAtom the power to set aside funds for Radioactive Waste and Spent Fuel Management that shall be drawn from nuclear plant operators – and with the ERC merely ‘consulted’? Doesn’t this move shove ERC off its turf as the official tariff regulator for the power sector? Any cost slapped on power operators, even if not passed on to consumers, must fall squarely under ERC’s regulatory hammer. So for now, are we just going to sit tight and wait for the courts to sort out this emerging regulatory dilemma – that in the process, may drag us through years of legal battles before anyone has the guts to draw clear lines of authority?

Fine, the bill says consumers won’t foot the bill for this fund – but does PhilAtom even have the expertise to sniff out and stop nuclear plant owners from pulling ‘creative accounting tricks’ if they would sneak those costs right back onto consumer bills?

On nuclear technologies, the bill also infers that “for those parts of the design that are the same as the identified standard design or the reference plant design, the Authority shall consider accepting the safety assessment of an experienced foreign nuclear regulatory body” – so, does this entail that PhilAtom will no longer do technology review or re-licensing prior to installation? What if such technology deployment has concealed IP infringement issues – who’s going to pick up the pieces and manage the backlash?

Here’s another loaded curveball in the bill: the PhilAtom Council can exempt reactor types from targeted installations – as long as the President signs it off via Executive Order. What does that mean exactly – are we allowing the Philippines to become a testing ground for nuclear tech still in its experimental infancy?

The bill further prescribes that PhilAtom may lean on outside consultants or external bodies, but only if it avoids ‘conflict of interest’ or ‘undue influence’ – fine words on paper, but here’s the real question: does that rule out advisers from countries peddling their own nuclear technologies to us? Because if we don’t draw the line, those cozy backdoor ties could morph into dirty deals faster than you can say ‘regulatory capture’.

Many more provisions in the PhilAtom bill are screaming for deeper scrutiny – and if this will be signed by President Marcos into law, the real tough test begins with those crafting the implementing rules and regulations (IRR). They better come in sharp, ask the hard questions, and do the heavy lifting on policymaking. Nuclear safety regulation can’t just come with a ‘cheat code’ – and anyone popping the champagne this early is just celebrating blind. We don’t need a feel-good story; we want a rock-solid blueprint of safety regulation that can hold the weight of a technology to be depended upon by generations.