Despicable scaremongering
Refusing to let a crisis go to waste, the recent insidious attempts by press agencies, anti-nuclear environmentalists and irresponsible politicians to fan the flames of public ignorance and irrational panic over the nuclear crisis in Fukushima, Japan, is despicable.
Reports have said the reactors had “exploded,” or were edging toward “catastrophic meltdown,” and the level of radiation leakage at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant has been deliberately and irresponsibly exaggerated.
Some of this reporting has at times come sickeningly close to resembling a deliberate attempt to encourage the public association of thousands of deaths with what has so far been the very limited radiation leakage in Fukushima.
Contrary to their political fig-leaf, many of the environmentalists protesting in Taipei on Sunday were not there to express their “uncertainty” about the safety of nuclear power — they were there to build political capital for the abolition of all nuclear power in Taiwan. High-profile figures such as Taiwan Environmental Protection Union head Lee Cho-han (李卓翰) even seemed to state as much publicly.
Such a policy would be disastrous because renewable power generators such as solar and wind are neither capable of generating an even remotely comparable output, or of running on a sufficiently cost-effective basis to serve as effective replacements for nuclear power plants.
The largest solar power station in the world — the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility — currently being built in California, is designed to produce 392 megawatts of power at an estimated cost of about NT$40 billion (US$1.35 billion). Taiwan’s Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in Longmen (龍門) is designed to produce well over 2.5 gigawatts of power, but at a cost so far of more than NT$270 billion. At best, therefore, once we account for the approximate seven-fold difference in power output of the two plants, the financial costs of a solar plant built with today’s technology are roughly equivalent to those of the much-delayed Longmen nuclear power plant.
Had Taiwan Power Co invested in a solar power station in 1997 rather than the Longmen nuclear power plant — as David Reid claimed it should have, along with other renewables (Letters, March 18, page 8) — the ratio of power output to financial cost would likely have been far worse given the comparatively poor state of solar cell technology in 1997.
I understand concerns about the safety of nuclear power in Taiwan given the nation’s geology. However, I submit that the removal of nuclear power from Taiwan would be an irresponsible act of considerable economic vandalism.
This would be a policy which, at the furthest logical reach of its consequences, would have to be measured in terms of the frustration of human values and suffering for want of electricity, not to mention the benefits that the control of electricity bestows upon society as a whole.
MICHAEL FAGAN
Tainan
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
RSS