The Smartest Nuclear Programme in ASEAN Hasn’t Built Anything Yet
Singapore has not built a nuclear reactor. It has not selected a site, chosen a vendor, or committed to a deployment timeline. By the conventional metrics of nuclear market development, it does not yet register as an active player. And yet, for every ASEAN nation currently navigating the early stages of its own nuclear programme, Singapore’s approach to this question is the most instructive model available in the region. The reason is not what Singapore has decided. It is how Singapore is deciding.
Across Southeast Asia, governments are moving into nuclear with urgency. Indonesia has a statutory target of 44 GW by 2060. Vietnam has reactivated its Ninh Thuan programme. The Philippines is targeting 1.2 GW by 2032. Malaysia has set a 1.2 GW SMR objective by 2035. The pace of commitment is accelerating, and the commercial opportunities this creates for the global nuclear industry are substantial. But pace without institutional depth creates risk, and risk defers capital. What the ASEAN nuclear market needs, alongside ambitious national targets, is a credible model of how to approach nuclear adoption with the rigour that transforms policy declarations into bankable, executable programmes. Singapore, quietly and methodically, is building exactly that model.
Capability Before Commitment: A Principle Worth Adopting
In 2012, Singapore concluded a pre-feasibility study that found then-available nuclear technologies unsuitable for deployment in a high-density city-state with severe land constraints and no margin for infrastructure error. Rather than treating that conclusion as a permanent verdict, Singapore treated it as the beginning of a structured, long-term preparedness programme. That distinction matters enormously.
Since 2014, the Singapore Nuclear Research and Safety Initiative (SNRSI) has been consolidating expertise and knowledge in nuclear technology, with more than $150 million invested to date. In July 2025, SNRSI was formally established as a full-fledged research institute, formalising its mandate to partner international laboratories in developing reactor simulation and modelling capabilities, analysing reactor safety designs, and building the domestic technical capacity to assess whether and how nuclear energy could be deployed in Singapore’s specific context. The National Environment Agency (NEA) has separately commissioned three comprehensive studies focused on nuclear safety benchmarking, environmental oversight frameworks, and local impact assessment. The Energy Market Authority (EMA) has conducted feasibility analysis projecting that nuclear could eventually meet around 10 percent of the nation’s electricity needs.
This is what capability-first nuclear development looks like. No vendor has been selected because no vendor needs to be selected yet. The institutional infrastructure required to make that selection responsibly is still being constructed, and Singapore is constructing it with the same precision and planning discipline it applies to every other critical national system. For ASEAN nations that are moving directly from policy aspiration to vendor engagement without the intermediate step of building independent assessment capacity, Singapore’s sequencing is a lesson that deserves close attention.
The Conditions That Make Singapore’s Model Transferable
The obvious objection to Singapore as an ASEAN benchmark is that its constraints are unique. A city-state of fewer than 800 square kilometres, with one of the highest population densities in the world, no natural resources, and neighbours in close proximity presents a nuclear siting and governance challenge that no other country in the region faces in quite the same configuration. These constraints are real. But they are also what makes Singapore’s eventual deployment decision, if it comes, so commercially and regulatorily significant for the rest of the region.
Singapore has already identified that its spatial challenge points toward specific solutions rather than permanent exclusion. Less populated and industrial areas such as Tuas and Jurong Island, offshore and island-based configurations, and underground siting have all been identified as viable pathways for SMR deployment. Underground siting in particular addresses safety risks, reduces surface land requirements, and directly mitigates the proximity concerns that would otherwise make nuclear deployment politically difficult in a dense urban environment. These are not theoretical considerations. They are the output of serious technical analysis by a government that has invested over $150 million in developing the institutional capacity to make these assessments credibly.
The transferable lesson for ASEAN is not the specific siting solutions Singapore is evaluating. It is the analytical process being applied to those questions. Every ASEAN nation considering SMR deployment has its own set of geographic, demographic, and infrastructure constraints. Indonesia’s archipelagic geography demands different solutions than Vietnam’s coastal industrial corridor. Malaysia’s grid structure presents different integration questions than the Philippines’ island-by-island power demand profile. What Singapore is demonstrating is that these constraints are best addressed through sustained, independent, evidence-driven analysis before vendor selection, not after. That principle holds regardless of the specific national context.
International Partnerships Built for Independence, Not Dependency
One of the structural risks for newcomer nuclear nations is that early engagement with a single vendor, however commercially attractive, can create technological and financial dependency that constrains future optionality. Singapore’s partnership strategy is deliberately constructed to avoid this outcome, and the architecture of that strategy is another element of the model that ASEAN nations should study carefully.
Singapore has signed capability-building agreements with the United States, France, the United Arab Emirates, and Sweden — and more recently, South Korea. These are not vendor agreements. They are knowledge-sharing and human resource development frameworks designed to build Singapore’s capacity to evaluate nuclear options independently, without being beholden to any single supplier’s technical framing. The MoU signed with the UAE’s Emirates Nuclear Energy Company in October 2024 specifically targets human resource development and international knowledge exchange. The engagement of technical firms such as Mott MacDonald to conduct independent assessments of advanced reactor design maturity and safety reflects the same philosophy: external expertise deployed in the service of sovereign analytical capacity, not as a substitute for it.
Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s announcement in his February 2025 Budget speech — that Singapore would study the potential deployment of nuclear energy and systematically build up capabilities in this area — signals that this approach has the highest level of political endorsement. Singapore is not importing a nuclear programme. It is building the domestic intellectual infrastructure to decide whether and how a nuclear programme makes sense for its specific conditions. When that decision is eventually made, it will carry a credibility that vendor-driven adoption simply cannot replicate. And when international capital looks at SMR projects across the region, the governance quality of Singapore’s preparation process will make any eventual deployment significantly more bankable than programmes built on less rigorous foundations.
What Singapore’s Deployment Would Mean for the Region
ASEAN is targeting 8.5 GW of nuclear capacity by 2037, representing an $84 billion investment signal to the global industry. Within that regional pipeline, a Singapore SMR deployment would carry disproportionate weight — not because of its scale, which would be modest relative to Indonesia’s or Vietnam’s ambitions, but because of what it would prove.
Singapore deploying an SMR safely, within a dense urban environment, under a rigorous independent regulatory framework, with full public transparency, would demonstrate something that the rest of ASEAN currently cannot: that SMR technology is deployable in the specific geographic and governance conditions that characterise much of Southeast Asia. It would provide the region with a reference deployment that is geographically proximate, culturally relevant, and institutionally credible in a way that the UAE’s Barakah plant, however impressive, cannot fully replicate for a Southeast Asian audience. It would also create a regulatory and safety knowledge base — developed within SNRSI and Singapore’s broader research institutions — that could be shared across the region under the same knowledge-partnership frameworks Singapore is already building with ASEAN neighbours.
For the global nuclear industry, that regional demonstration effect has direct commercial value. Vendors that participate in Singapore’s programme, on whatever terms Singapore’s rigorous selection process eventually permits, will carry reference credentials that are specifically tailored to the ASEAN market context. The firms watching Singapore’s preparedness process closely are the firms that understand this. The ones that are not paying attention will find themselves at a disadvantage when Singapore’s procurement window opens.
The Standard That Attracts Capital
Nuclear benchmarks in ASEAN are typically discussed in terms of capacity targets and construction timelines. Singapore is setting a different kind of benchmark — one that is about the quality of the decision-making process rather than the speed of deployment. In a region where the credibility of nuclear programmes will ultimately determine their ability to attract international capital and qualified technology partners, that is the benchmark that matters most.
The ASEAN nations that study Singapore’s approach and build equivalent institutional depth into their own programmes will find that the international nuclear industry engages with them more seriously, that financing partners assess their projects more favourably, and that their procurement processes attract more competitive and credible vendor submissions. At the same time, these dynamics are reinforced through platforms like NBP’s Asia Nuclear Business Platform (ANBP) 2026 (3–5 November, Hanoi), where policymakers, investors, and vendors refine financing and partnership models while building the relationships that ultimately shape market access.
The nations that rush to procurement without that foundation will find the opposite. Singapore has not yet decided to build a nuclear reactor. But it has already decided how a nuclear reactor should be evaluated, selected, and governed. For the rest of ASEAN, that decision is the one worth learning from.
