Nuclear power is back in the government’s five-year plan. A study is running. Parliament has changed a law it left alone for 41 years. All of it is real.
Zamzam Jaafar ran Malaysia Nuclear Power Corporation (MNPC), the body set up to build the plant last time. In 2017 he said Malaysia was still getting ready, the law had not reached Parliament, and the treaties were unsigned. MNPC was shut two years later.
Malaysia has been getting ready since 1972
Oil prices spiked in the early 1970s. The cabinet approved a research centre in Bangi to train people for nuclear power. The centre’s reactor has run since 1982. It makes no electricity. Malaysia has never built a power plant.
The closest it came was October 2016, when a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency spent eight days in Putrajaya. The agency is the United Nations nuclear watchdog. It keeps a checklist of 19 things a country needs before it builds. Safety rules, a waste plan, trained staff. Malaysia passed, and was told it was ready to decide.
Then an election ended it
Barisan Nasional lost in May 2018. By July, energy minister Yeo Bee Yin said the new government would not build nuclear plants. Stopping was easy, she said, because nothing had been signed. In September, Mahathir Mohamad, back as prime minister, said he did not believe in nuclear power. MNPC closed on Nov 20, 2019.
The rebuild has reached the same point
In November 2024, then economy minister Rafizi Ramli said the cabinet had agreed to put nuclear back in the plan. The plan came out in July 2025. Two days later the energy ministry ordered a study and gave the work to MyPower Corporation. MyPower was set up to shake up how electricity is bought and sold.
Parliament rewrote the 1984 nuclear law. It took effect in December 2025. Much of it does not work yet. The parts on permits and on waste need detailed rules, and nobody has written them.
Malaysia has not signed five treaties it needs. Two it did sign are not yet binding. A signature is only a promise until the paperwork is finished, and Malaysia has not finished it. Those are the gaps Zamzam listed in 2017.
The trained people are gone. Science minister Chang Lih Kang said in June that Malaysians with nuclear training go abroad, because there is no nuclear work here. Training them was Bangi’s job in 1972.
This Parliament ends by December 2027, so an election comes first. The nuclear decision belongs to whoever wins it. No site. No reactor. No contract. That is where Yeo found it in 2018.
The date has already moved
The plan published in July 2025 gave 2031 as the year operations begin. In June, Chang said the government aims to decide by 2031 whether to go nuclear at all.
The year has not moved. What it means has. In eleven months, 2031 went from the date a plant switches on to the date somebody chooses whether to build one.
Budget 2026 gave the programme RM28.6 million for studies, training and writing the rules. A single plant would cost tens of billions of ringgit. This is money for reading, not for concrete. Energy policy director Nora Yusma Mohamed Yusoff of Universiti Tenaga Nasional said nobody can tell whether nuclear would cut bills. The cost figures are not public.
The case the other way
Mahathir quit when gas was cheap and nobody had promised to cut emissions to zero by 2050. Quitting cost almost nothing, because Malaysia had spent on studies and not on construction. The watchdog’s process is meant to be slow and reversible. A country that rushes this stage is the one to worry about.
But quitting now would cost far more
At its busiest moment peninsular Malaysia draws 21.3 gigawatts. A gigawatt is a thousand megawatts, roughly one large power station. The energy ministry told Parliament on June 30 that the figure reaches 33.5 gigawatts by 2035, or 12.2 gigawatts more in nine years. That is a dozen more large power stations.
Most of that growth has one cause. In the same reply, the ministry said data centres will take 31% of the peninsula’s electricity by 2035, against 7% this year.
Malaysia finished this stage once already. The second attempt has cost no money, only nine years, and the trained people are still overseas. Stopping now would be easy again, because nothing has been signed. The date has already moved once without anyone stopping it.
