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Viet Nam’s race to go nuclear leaves villagers in limbo
27 April 2026 at 14:52 (Updated on 27 April 2026 at 17:41)
Viet Nam wants to open its first nuclear power plant by 2031, but experts question the timeline and villagers fear for their livelihoods
A dismantled snail farm in Vinh Tuong, south-central Viet Nam. The country has designated this village as the site of its first nuclear power plant, necessitating the resettlement of over 2,000 people. PHOTO: Minh Tran
KHÁNH HÒA, VIET NAM – As Vietnamese lined their streets with spring flowers and red-lettered banners – popular Lunar New Year decorations –celebrations were sparse in Vinh Tuong village. No new furniture was bought; no house renovation or repainting was allowed.
With most men in the village unemployed, locals had little reason for cheer. Bay Sang said the spotted babylon snail farms, which were once their main source of income, are now being dismantled one by one.
His village of Vinh Tuong has been designated by the government as the site of the country’s first nuclear power plant, Ninh Thuận 1.
The government is preparing to relocate 477 households with about 2,000 people to a new settlement around 5 km north of the village.
The groundbreaking ceremony for the resettlement site was held in January, and Viet Nam’s deputy prime minister were among the attendees. While construction has yet to begin, and no move-out date has been set, the closing of snail farms is already impacting Vinh Tuong residents.
“I have not had a stable job in half a year,” Sang said, before heading off to help close down one of the last remaining farms. For Sang, who has worked on snail farms for a little over a decade, there are limited alternatives.
Decades in limbo
This is not the first time Vinh Tuong has experienced such precarity. Back in 2009, the National Assembly had approved plans for the country’s first two nuclear power plants, and Vinh Tuong was one of the chosen sites. But the plant was never built.
Construction had been scheduled to begin in 2014 with operations expected by 2020. The project was to be led by state-owned company Electricity of Vietnam (EVN) in partnership with Russia’s state nuclear company Rosatom. In 2016, due to fiscal pressures, the National Assembly voted to indefinitely shelve the nuclear program. For families of Vinh Tuong, the seven years from 2009 to 2016 were filled with confusion and a sense of stagnation.
“Life was hard during those years,” said Sang. “We were not allowed to do anything.” No investments into the village were permitted, no new farms could be built, and failing roads were left unfixed, he noted.
Now, nearly a decade later, that reality has returned. This time, however, displacement is close to a certainty, with Viet Nam’s growing energy demands fueling Ha Noi’s renewed commitment to getting the nuclear project off the ground.
A nation’s thirst for energy
In the ten years since the country’s first commercial nuclear attempt was halted, its economy has nearly doubled in size, from USD 252 billion in 2016 to USD 484 billion in 2025, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Viet Nam has emerged as a manufacturing hub of Southeast Asia. To fuel this industrial boom, it has raced to expand its grid. Installed generating capacity grew from 42 gigawatts (GW) in 2016 to around 87 GW in 2025 – the second highest in the region, according to EVN.
That growth, however, has not kept pace with demand.
In the summer of 2023, rolling power shortages disrupted factories and businesses across the northern provinces, Viet Nam’s hub for high-tech electronics. The World Bank estimated the energy constraints caused USD 1.4 billion of economic losses.
Renewable energy has grown fast. But becoming Southeast Asia’s largest producer of solar and wind power has come with its own complications. Viet Nam’s generous feed-in tariffs – the promise to buy solar and wind electricity at above-market prices for 20 years – have incurred significant losses for EVN.
To ease energy needs, Viet Nam has turned to its neighbours. In 2025, it imported around 1.6 GW from Laos and 0.6 GW from China, just under 2.4% of total capacity. It plans to increase both sharply, including an additional 3 GW from China, by 2030. A 500-kilovolt transmission line connecting to the Chinese border went online last year, costing USD 280 million.
Fast tracking nuclear
To further shore up its energy supply, the National Assembly voted to revive the nuclear program in November 2024. Since then, the government has moved fast. Just weeks later, in January 2025, EVN and Rosatom signed a memorandum of understanding during Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin’s visit to Ha Noi.
By April 2025, the government had revised its power development plan (2021-2030) so it includes nuclear power. Under the new plan, the Ninh Thuận 1 and 2 plants are expected to provide a collective 4-6.4 GW of capacity by 2035. Months later, the National Assembly passed a new Atomic Energy Law, aligning with current International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) standards.
“There is strong optimism within the leadership about Viet Nam’s new status as a rising middle power. Having an operational nuclear power plant would be a major national statement.”
Nguyễn Khắc Giang – visiting fellow at ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute
In March 2026, as Ha Noi navigated fuel shortages amid the US-Israel war on Iran, Viet Nam and Russia’s partnership was formalized during Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính’s visit to Moscow.
According to Rosatom’s press release, the agreement covers cooperation on building two power units with a combined capacity of 2.5 GW to form Ninh Thuận 1.
Nguyễn Khắc Giang, visiting fellow at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, said the revival carries “strong personal imprint of Party chief Tô Lâm and Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính”, suggesting a political spirit behind this nuclear push.
The nuclear revival was pushed hard in the lead-up to the Communist Party’s five-yearly congress, held in January 2025. Tô Lâm, re-elected as Party general secretary, has branded himself as the reformist that Viet Nam needs to achieve high growth – and the nuclear plant, Giang said, was a political project to demonstrate that.
“There is strong optimism within the leadership about Viet Nam’s new status as a rising middle power,” Giang said. “Having an operational nuclear power plant would be a major national statement.”
‘Unrealistic’ timeline
Viet Nam’s government aims for Ninh Thuận 1 to be operational by the end of 2031, to coincide with the centenary of the Communist Party. “Working during the day is not enough, we need to work at night,” Prime Minister Chính told the nuclear steering committee in January 2026.
Experts say the schedule is unrealistic.
“It is impossible to develop a nuclear power plant on the schedule determined by the Vietnamese government,” said Hisanori Nei, a former director at Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency who checked compliance with nuclear export safety standards.
Japan had previously been expected to build the second plant. But in December 2025, they withdrew from the project, citing timeline concerns.
“No Japanese company can guarantee that timeline,” Nei said. “If the Vietnamese government were rather flexible, maybe the Japanese consortium could discuss. But so far, the Vietnamese government has determined the timeline to be fixed.”
Human resources pose another challenge, with the first two plants needing at least 2,500 specialized engineers and technicians to operate them. While hundreds of students were trained in nuclear engineering in both Russian and Vietnamese universities for the 2016 nuclear project, the field has dwindled sharply after the project was shelved. In 2025, Viet Nam only counted around 400 nuclear power workers, according to EVN.
The country now plans to train around 4,000 specialists by 2035. Even so, analysts believe the timeline will likely slip.
“Delay is almost guaranteed,” Giang said. “But delay would not be the worst outcome. A rushed nuclear project that fails would be far more dangerous, and no top leader in Viet Nam wants to be associated with a nuclear disaster.”
EVN did not respond to a request for comment on the project’s timeline.
Writing in Fulcrum, Giang argued a 15-year timeline would be more realistic, pointing to international precedents such as Britain’s Hinkley Point C – ongoing since 2017 and due in 2031 – and Finland’s Olkiluoto-3, which opened in 2023, 14 years behind schedule. Even China, he noted, averages seven years per reactor.
Julius Cesar Trajano, a research fellow at the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, shares the skepticism about the 2031 target, but doubts that Viet Nam will sacrifice safety for speed.
For him, Viet Nam’s track record as an active member of the IAEA and ASEANTOM – Southeast Asia’s network of nuclear regulatory bodies – gives it a stronger foundation for oversight than most of its neighbors.
“Viet Nam will not just build up nuclear power without the necessary regulatory and safety infrastructure in place,” Trajano said.
Precarious future
For the people of Vinh Tuong, discussions about timelines and potential partners feel distant.
“It’s a national project. How can we fight back?” said Nhan, a 64-year-old third-generation villager. “We support the plant, but the compensation must be fair.”
Residents are frustrated that over a year after Viet Nam’s nuclear revival, the government has yet to put forward a compensation proposal they can agree to. Villagers say the assurances of land and infrastructure at the new settlement won’t help them pay for the costs of rebuilding homes and lives.
Nhan has two family graves in the village that will need to be exhumed and relocated. Earlier this year, the government offered VND 15 million (USD 570) per grave, which Nhan said is barely enough to cover the move and erect a new tombstone. By the time of publication, authorities had raised the compensation to VND 24 million (USD 910), a villager disclosed.
Livelihood is another concern.
“The beach here has long been the villagers’ sustenance,” Nhan said, pointing toward the ocean. Even on a bad day, people can go to the shore and come back with crabs or seaweed. “You can’t starve here.”
Nhan is not sure the new settlement will offer anything similar. What he wants, he said, is for the government to help young people find stable jobs, potentially working in factories. However, no such promises have been made.
In a different environment, snail farmers like Bay Sang will struggle to find similar jobs.
“They will give land for houses, but not for snail farms,” Sang said. “We are unemployed now. But we will definitely be unemployed there, too.”
EVN and the Khánh Hòa Provincial People’s Committee, the local government body overseeing resettlement for the Ninh Thuận 1 and 2 projects, were contacted about the Vinh Tuong villagers’ concerns, but did not respond.
This article was first published on Dialogue Earth on April 22, 2026. It was lightly edited to match Mekong Eye’s editorial style and republished under Creative Commons license.
About the writer
Minh Tran
Minh Tran is a Ho Chi Minh City-based journalist, reporting on development, geopolitics, and governance across Southeast Asia. More by Minh Tran
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