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Getting rid of nuclear power just the first step

France, a country well-known for its development of nuclear power, has decided to halt further nuclear power research. Japan had several nuclear power accidents in 1999. Here in Taiwan scholars have proposed alternatives to nuclear power which are both environmentally and economically beneficial. All these factors legitimized opposition to the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant.

Local opposition to nuclear power has focused on the industry's safety threats, high economic costs and the waste disposal issue, as well as Taiwan's flawed energy policy and economic planning. We want to challenge the unsafe, environmentally unfriendly technology of nuclear power as well as the exploitation of Taiwan's ecological environment and social wealth by the state-owned Taiwan Power Company's (Taipower, 台灣電力公司) energy monopoly.

Electricity is usually generated through natural energy power(hydro-electric, thermal, wind). Formosa Plastics' chairman Wang Yung-ching's (王永慶) persistent interest in investing in power plants in China proves the huge profitability of such plants.

Taipower has long monopolized the production and sale of electricity. As a state-own enterprise, it builds power plants with tax money and then sells the electricity to the people. Govern-ment revenues increase when Taipower makes money. With profit-making as its management priority, Taipower is not the kind of state-owned enterprise designed -- in the spirit of Socialism -- to stabilize commodity prices and provide important daily necessities. It's monopolistic privileges and profit-seeking mechanism nourishes perfunctory, corrupt and abonormal practices.

The construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant is the result of Taipower's disregard of environmental protection and safety. Halting construction has been a core demand of environmentalists. However, if the new government liberalizes the power industry, in addition to halting the construction of the plant, our next challenge would be dealing with be problems stemming from the privitization of state-run enterprises and liberalization of the power industry.

After all, are liberalization and privatization the elixir to problems deriving from a state monopoly? Not if the insider trading in the privitization of Taiwan Fertilizer's (台肥) is anything to go by. The scandal discredits the right-wing neo-liberalist worship of market mechanisms in the 1980s.

In Taiwan, the liberalization of the power industry would shift some of the monopoly privileges from the state bureaucracy to the private sector. Nat Bellocchi, the former chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan, claimed that Taiwan would face energy shortages and foreign investment would leave if the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant project were halted.

If the government liberalizes the power industry after halting the construction of the plant, it's not difficult to foresee that Taiwan's conglomerates will continue to build more power plants far beyond our electrical needs. Riding on the "energy-intensive" advantage, they will introduce (or keep the existing) energy-intensive and highly polluting industries (such as cement and petrochemical). That will exacerbate the pollution problem, and speed up the monopoly and concentration of wealth.

That's why the anti-nuclear movement plans to ensure that the DPP will not break its promise to halt construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant. The next step will be to challenge chronic problems in economic planning and energy policy -- to lay the foundation for the future environmental movement.

Ting Wen-sheng is a postgraduate student at the Institute of Labor Research, National Chengchi University.

Translated by Kathy
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