President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is fond of saying that the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in Gongliao District (貢寮), New Taipei City (新北市), would not continue unless the plant’s safety can be guaranteed. However, even international industrial nuclear power organizations like the World Nuclear Association (WNA) cannot guarantee nuclear safety, so how can Ma?
Given the public’s strong opposition to the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, there is no need to hold a referendum to decide if it should be finished. The right thing to do is to halt construction of the plant straightaway.
Just a few days ago, Ma and Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) said that “direct public opinion” — a referendum — should take precedence over “indirect public opinion” and that the government’s legislative and administrative bodies cannot make the decision to halt construction unilaterally, because this would be “unconstitutional.”
Legal academics from National Taiwan University condemned these remarks as absurd.
As long as the legislature respects public opinion and agrees to suspend the construction, the Cabinet can implement that decision.
Recently, the Atomic Energy Council invited experts from the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to Taiwan to inspect the nation’s power plants. According to information provided by Taiwan Power Co and the Atomic Energy Council, stress tests conducted on the nation’s three operational nuclear power plants did not follow the strict protocols that caused Germany to close down eight nuclear plants that had been operational for more than 30 years.
Taiwan’s geology shows that there are active faults 7km from the three operational nuclear power plants, and active volcanoes within 20km. There are more than 70 underwater volcanoes within an 80km radius of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, 11 of which are active. If these factors were combined with extreme weather, the consequences could be terrible.
The WNA has said that the US does not have a safe place to permanently store the more than 70,000 tonnes of nuclear waste that it has produced so far. More than three-quarters of the waste is kept in long-term storage in temporary spent fuel pools like those used at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. A problem with the cooling system would have terrible consequences.
Since Taiwan already has problems processing its nuclear waste at the three operational power plants and since the seismic coefficient at these plants fall between 0.3G and 0.4G, compared with the Fukushima plant’s 0.6G, how can the government consider continuing construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant?
Will it really be possible to evacuate the residents of New Taipei City, Keelung, Taipei and Taoyuan County, referred to collectively as the “Fourth Nuclear Power Plant evacuation zone,” in the event of a nuclear disaster?
There is no need for the Ma administration to use its propaganda machine to intimidate the public. Instead, it should immediately halt construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant.
A referendum on the issue would not solve the problems that could be caused by natural disasters and human error. New energy sources need to be developed to replace nuclear power and gradual steps must be taken toward making the nation a nuclear-free country. This is the only way to guarantee public safety and quality of life.
Lu I-ming is a former publisher and president of the Taiwan Shin Sheng Daily News, and previously served as a member of a watchdog monitoring Taipower.
Translated by Drew Cameron
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past