As towns and villages across Vietnam lined their streets with Lunar New Year decorations, including spring flowers and red-lettered banners, in Vinh Tuong, celebrations were sparse. 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 Thuan 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, with Vietnam’s deputy prime minister in attendance. While construction there 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. Second 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 programme. 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 Vietnam’s growing energy demands fuelling Hanoi’s renewed commitment to getting the nuclear project off the ground.
A national 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.
Vietnam 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. Recommended In the summer of 2023, rolling power shortages disrupted factories and businesses across the northern provinces, Vietnam’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 . Vietnam’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, Vietnam 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 programme 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 Hanoi. The proposed site of Ninh Thuan 1 in Vinh Tuong. Under the government’s power development plan (2021-2030), the Ninh Thuan 1 and 2 plants are expected to provide a collective 4-6.4 GW of capacity by 2035 (Image: Minh Tran) By April 2025, the government had revised its power development plan (2021-2030) so it includes nuclear power. Under the new plan, the Ninh Thuan 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.
In March 2026, as Hanoi navigated fuel shortages amid the US-Israel war on Iran, Vietnam and Russia’s partnership was formalised during Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Minh Chinh’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 Thuan 1.
Nguyen Khac Giang, visiting fellow at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, told Dialogue Earth the revival carries “strong personal imprint of Party chief To Lam and Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh”, 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. To Lam, re-elected as Party general secretary, has branded himself as the reformist that Vietnam 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 Vietnam’s new status as a rising middle power,” Giang said. “Having an operational nuclear power plant would be a major national statement.”
A difficult timeline
Vietnam’s government aims for Ninh Thuan 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 Chinh 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 specialised 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, Vietnam 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. Recommended “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 Vietnam 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 scepticism about the 2031 target, but doubts that Vietnam will sacrifice safety for speed.
For him, Vietnam’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 neighbours.
“Vietnam will not just build up nuclear power without the necessary regulatory and safety infrastructure in place,” Trajano said.
A haunting uncertainty
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.” Nhan, a 64-year-old third-generation villager from Vinh Tuong, is worried about the potential loss of livelihoods in the new settlement (Image: Minh Tran) Residents are frustrated that over a year after Vietnam’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 told Dialogue Earth.
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 Khanh Hoa Provincial People’s Committee, the local government body overseeing resettlement for the Ninh Thuan 1 and 2 projects, were contacted about the Vinh Tuong villagers’ concerns, but did not respond. The post Vietnam’s race to go nuclear leaves villagers in limbo appeared first on Dialogue Earth .