There are no guarantees in this world that anything is completely safe and nuclear power is no exception.
Today we face extreme weather events and frequent seismic activity. Given the attendant risks, not even cutting-edge technology can provide safety guarantees, and this is also true for nuclear power stations.
In the past, anti-earthquake designs were built to withstand peak ground accelerations (PGAs) of 0.3G (the acceleration of the Earth’s gravity, equivilant to g-force) or 0.4G, and stand up to quakes registering magnitude 6, 7 or 8.
Then, Japan suffered the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster caused by a major quake on March 11, 2011, that registered magnitude 9, creating a tsunami more than 40m high and shattering any illusions of assured nuclear safety.
The subsequent chain of events brought about by these disasters, combined with the damage wrought to the nuclear power plant facilities, cost at least 15,854 lives, and the destruction of over a million buildings. This was the most tragic natural disaster, in terms of the human cost, in post-war Japan.
From the way Taiwan Power Co is constantly putting back its timetable for upgrading the earthquake-proof facilities at the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s (新北市), Shihmen District (石門), forcing the Atomic Energy Council in November last year to announce an ultimatum using the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法), it seems that the earthquake-proofing of the nation’s nuclear power facilities is cause for concern.
The Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in Gongliao District (貢寮), New Taipei City (新北市), is reputed to include safety precautions such as shut down at a PGA of 0.4g, making it able to withstand earthquakes of magnitude 8. Still, it is not known whether it could cope with quakes measuring magnitude 9.
Like Taiwan, California lies on the Pacific Ring of Fire and last year the US Geological Survey said there is a 46 percent probability that the state will experience a major earthquake of magnitude 7.5 or over before 2038. Experts have also said that an earthquake of more than magnitude 9 is due in the Manila Trench, which extends from the west of the Philippines to the Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan is also the only country in the world to place a nuclear power plant within 50km of its capital city, and political and economic center.
According to the UK-based global risk and strategic consulting firm Maplecroft, more than one in 10 of the world’s 442 nuclear power plants are located in areas designated as high or extremely high risk. Taiwan is one of these areas, and experts warn that these plants face the same risks as Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, but lack Japan’s ability to address them.
Not so long ago the concept of extreme weather disasters had yet to percolate into the global consciousness. A recent US National Climate Assessment report showed that the mainstream media were ignorant of the risks of earthquakes and tsunamis, and were inadequately informed about the earth sciences.
Taiwan is not a suitable place to build nuclear power plants, given the high incidence of natural disasters in this area.
Irene Chen (陳藹玲), founder of Mom Loves Taiwan, an association for mothers against nuclear power, put it best when she asked: “How much compensation would it take to make gambling the lives of millions of people, and the very future of the country, worthwhile?”
“This isn’t a question for the experts, it’s a simple question of logic,” she added.
How right she is.
Lu I-ming previously served as a member of a watchdog monitoring Taiwan Power Co.
Translated by Paul Cooper
We are used to hearing that whenever something happens, it means Taiwan is about to fall to China. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) cannot change the color of his socks without China experts claiming it means an invasion is imminent. So, it is no surprise that what happened in Venezuela over the weekend triggered the knee-jerk reaction of saying that Taiwan is next. That is not an opinion on whether US President Donald Trump was right to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro the way he did or if it is good for Venezuela and the world. There are other, more qualified
This should be the year in which the democracies, especially those in East Asia, lose their fear of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “one China principle” plus its nuclear “Cognitive Warfare” coercion strategies, all designed to achieve hegemony without fighting. For 2025, stoking regional and global fear was a major goal for the CCP and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA), following on Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Little Red Book admonition, “We must be ruthless to our enemies; we must overpower and annihilate them.” But on Dec. 17, 2025, the Trump Administration demonstrated direct defiance of CCP terror with its record US$11.1 billion arms
China’s recent aggressive military posture around Taiwan simply reflects the truth that China is a millennium behind, as Kobe City Councilor Norihiro Uehata has commented. While democratic countries work for peace, prosperity and progress, authoritarian countries such as Russia and China only care about territorial expansion, superpower status and world dominance, while their people suffer. Two millennia ago, the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius (孟子) would have advised Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that “people are the most important, state is lesser, and the ruler is the least important.” In fact, the reverse order is causing the great depression in China right now,
As technological change sweeps across the world, the focus of education has undergone an inevitable shift toward artificial intelligence (AI) and digital learning. However, the HundrED Global Collection 2026 report has a message that Taiwanese society and education policymakers would do well to reflect on. In the age of AI, the scarcest resource in education is not advanced computing power, but people; and the most urgent global educational crisis is not technological backwardness, but teacher well-being and retention. Covering 52 countries, the report from HundrED, a Finnish nonprofit that reviews and compiles innovative solutions in education from around the world, highlights a
RSS