The Ministry of economic Affairs announced on Wednesday that Reactor No. 1 of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮), also known as the Longmen (龍門) Nuclear Power Plant, had passed safety inspections and tests. Minister of Economic Affairs Chang Chia-juch (張家祝) and members of the ministry’s safety evaluation group said that they would feel quite confident about the plant should it go into operation.
However, assessments of a nuclear plant’s safety should take into account its entire life cycle.
A plant that is up to standard before it starts operating provides no guarantees to assuage people’s worries about the plant’s safety once in operation, not to mention the disposal of spent fuel from the plant when it is eventually decommissioned.
Is the Longmen plant really safe?
Apart from risks arising from deliberate or accidental human actions, any qualified civil engineer has full confidence in the safety of a nuclear power plant or waste disposal facility that they have designed based upon the conditions and safety factors on which the engineer relied during production. There is plenty of data to show that the natural and social conditions of today will change in time, and Taiwan is an especially changeable environment.
Natural threats like typhoons, earthquakes and landslides, as well as human factors such as overdevelopment, make Taiwan’s steep and mountainous terrain very unstable. Also, in recent years the greenhouse effect has had a noticeable impact in the form of climate change. Super-powerful typhoons and super-heavy rainstorms can cause sudden changes in the surface terrain, and they also bring about gradual changes in the subterranean geological and hydrological environment.
When the environment in which nuclear power stations or fuel disposal facilities are located changes to the extent that it no longer matches the conditions under which the structures were originally designed, they will no longer comply with safety factors, creating a high risk of nuclear disasters.
Experience teaches that nothing is absolutely safe and no environment will remain unchanged forever. No technology is completely fail-safe and everyone makes mistakes. If weather experts are still unable to precisely predict the track that a typhoon will follow, what guarantee can nuclear power experts give for safety in an industry that involves very long-term, complex and changeable factors?
All worldwide nuclear accidents have fallen outside experts’ predictions. Luckily for Taiwan, it has thus far not suffered a destructive or deadly nuclear accident, but government officials and nuclear experts cannot deny or overlook the possibility of such an accident occurring in the future.
Safety evaluation group members who took part in the recent inspection emphasize that nuclear safety is a very specialized, complex and rigorous field. What they should admit, however, is that an assessment of the safety of a nuclear power plant throughout its life cycle goes beyond expertise and complexity. It is difficult, indeed impossible, to account for every eventuality.
Thousands of Taiwanese school students are suffering the consequences of education reforms that were not planned with sufficient thought, but at least those mistakes can be rectified. However, when it comes to nuclear power, it can never be guaranteed to be 100 percent safe, and if anything goes wrong it could wreck the lives of millions of people for countless generations. How can we gamble away people’s lives and livelihoods just to save a few dollars on our monthly electricity bills?
Lai Cheng-i is a professor at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology.
Translated by Julian Clegg
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS