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 government and local industries breathed a sigh of relief after Shin Kong Life Insurance Co last week said it would relinquish surface rights for two plots in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投) to Nvidia Corp. The US chip-design giant’s plan to expand its local presence will be crucial for Taiwan to safeguard its core role in the global artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem and to advance the nation’s AI development. The land in dispute is owned by the Taipei City Government, which in 2021 sold the rights to develop and use the two plots of land, codenamed T17 and T18, to the
Taiwan’s first case of African swine fever (ASF) was confirmed on Tuesday evening at a hog farm in Taichung’s Wuci District (梧棲), trigging nationwide emergency measures and stripping Taiwan of its status as the only Asian country free of classical swine fever, ASF and foot-and-mouth disease, a certification it received on May 29. The government on Wednesday set up a Central Emergency Operations Center in Taichung and instituted an immediate five-day ban on transporting and slaughtering hogs, and on feeding pigs kitchen waste. The ban was later extended to 15 days, to account for the incubation period of the virus

The ceasefire in the Middle East is a rare cause for celebration in that war-torn region. Hamas has released all of the living hostages it captured on Oct. 7, 2023, regular combat operations have ceased, and Israel has drawn closer to its Arab neighbors. Israel, with crucial support from the United States, has achieved all of this despite concerted efforts from the forces of darkness to prevent it. Hamas, of course, is a longtime client of Iran, which in turn is a client of China. Two years ago, when Hamas invaded Israel — killing 1,200, kidnapping 251, and brutalizing countless others
US President Donald Trump has announced his eagerness to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un while in South Korea for the APEC summit. That implies a possible revival of US-North Korea talks, frozen since 2019. While some would dismiss such a move as appeasement, renewed US engagement with North Korea could benefit Taiwan’s security interests. The long-standing stalemate between Washington and Pyongyang has allowed Beijing to entrench its dominance in the region, creating a myth that only China can “manage” Kim’s rogue nation. That dynamic has allowed Beijing to present itself as an indispensable power broker: extracting concessions from Washington, Seoul