Turn Cuba into the first country in Latin America with nuclear energy. That was one of the dreams of Fidel Castro who, in the middle of the Cold War, had an ambitious energy revolution in mind. His ally: the Soviet Union, with whom he shared plans to create the Juraguá nuclear power plant to stop depending on oil imports.
The result: a catastrophe that became a dream cut short during and after the fall of the USSR. This is the story of the Cienfuegos nuclear power plant that is still half done and is a ghost nuclear city.
USA? That Cuba had a great relationship with the Soviet Union is no secret. But before the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the country held talks to create a nuclear power plant with the least expected: the United States. In fact, in 1956, the two governments signed an ‘Agreement on Cooperation on Civil Uses of Energy’.
With it, it was intended to cooperate to design and build nuclear reactors to produce electricity. With the revolution and, above all, with the missile crisis in 1962, everything became a dead letter. However, the newly promoted Fidel Castro could look to a new ally: the Soviet Union.
Juragua. The country’s leaders had changed, but the desire for a powerful energy source remained and, in the mid-1970s, Havana and Moscow signed agreements for cooperation in the fields of nuclear energy and most importantly: an agreement to the construction of reactors. At first, the project contemplated a dozen reactors, with four located in Juraguá, another four in Puerto Esperanza and the same number in Holguín, but in the end the construction of only two was completed, both in Juraguá.
Soviet design. The reactors would be the VVER-440 V318. They were the first of Soviet design and had already been tested in Eastern Europe. The other Soviet design was the RBMK, which may sound familiar to you because it was the one at the Chernobyl plant. But hey, let’s return to Caribbean soil.
The VVER-440 used light water as a coolant, so it was efficient for the time and the idea was to build four units capable of generating 440 MW each. It was estimated that the first of the reactors alone would have satisfied more than 15% of the energy demand of the entire country.
That’s how it would have been
Essential. Thus, in 1983, construction of the first rector began. The labor was Cuban, the parts were Soviet, some thinking minds were also Russian engineers and supervising the entire project was Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart, Fidel Castro’s son. Known as ‘Fidelito’, he was a nuclear physicist who had trained in Moscow, specifically at Voronezh State University, so it made sense that he would supervise the project (he was also the son of who he was).
The idea was that the first reactor would be operational by 1993 and, in a 1990 report signed by ‘Fidelito’ himself, nuclear energy was shown as the “essential factor for the development” of the nation, taking into account that It would be the energy engine of sectors such as medicine, agriculture, industry or science. Furthermore, the idea was to stop depending on oil imports.
Fidel stated that “2.4 million tons of oil will no longer be consumed annually, an amount that doubles the volumes of national crude oil extraction.” In addition, he calculated the savings that the operation would entail: several hundred million dollars. It wasn’t very specific, no.
The fall of the USSR and the power plant. In the end, calculations and intentions did not matter in the slightest. From the desired opening of the first reactor in 1993, after recalculating the options, it was indicated that it would be operational at the end of 1995, at the earliest, but the 90s had other plans. The Soviet Union collapsed and, with it, Fidel Castro’s nuclear power plant dream. 1.1 billion dollars in the trash.
Without the USSR, Cuba lost its main trading partner, its source of financial support and also all the necessary technical assistance from Russian engineers and technicians. Construction was halted in 1992, when the first reactor was 90% complete and the second 30% complete. Despite media outlets that claimed in 1997 that Cuba had not renounced the nuclear project, the government failed to try to establish ties with other countries for its reactivation.
Doubts. During that time, some of the plant workers defected to the United States, commenting that Cuba did not have the capacity to safely operate the nuclear facility. Simply, the Cuban operators had not received complete training to check the reactor components and that, of the 5,000 welding points that had passed inspection, between 10 and 15% were defective. Likewise, voices arose that pointed to the defective construction of the plant.
resurrection attempt. We may think that it was simply an economic failure, but the truth is that the skeleton of the Juraguá plant is still there, where it stopped 30 years ago, with the materials decomposing and starring in a landscape that seems taken from a movie or video game about natural disasters. .
Cuba looked the other way until, at the end of 2000, Vladimir Putin visited the island. His offer: $800 million in six years to finish the reactor, but Fidel was not interested. And Putin’s was not an offer of good will: Cuba had a debt estimated at 20 billion dollars with the USSR, a debt that Russia inherited and about which Fidel did not want to know anything either.
flintstones. The worst thing is not the damage that was caused to nature, but rather that the idea was for the workers to move to the area. As we can read on the BBC, around 4,000 people decided to stay in the so-called ‘Nuclear City’ after the project was abandoned. The initial idea was to create something like Chernobyl: a city out of nothing, attached to a nuclear power plant, but the project went to waste along with the USSR, preventing the achievement of that nuclear dream.
This is what remains today
Nuclear fuel was never delivered and the primary components had never been installed, so there is only stone and concrete. Curiously, and as pointed out in Cubanet, there are those who can live off the plant. They are the so-called ‘flints’, people who get up every day and dedicate themselves to hitting the concrete to get to the copper in the pipes and the steel in the reinforced concrete, which they later sell.
And, from this whole story, someone surely felt relieved: the United States, which saw how, from one day to the next, its main enemy was going to build a nuclear power plant just 4,600 kilometers from its coasts.
Imágenes | Google Maps, David Grant, Hvd69
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