Japanese representatives from the No Nuke Asia Forum (NNAF,
Taipower responded by issuing a statement in which it denied the charge. It said it had signed only one agreement -- with North Korea.
TEPU spokesman Pan Han-chiang (潘翰疆), quoting the NNAF and Russia's Ecoline Web site, said Taipower had asked Japan's Asia TAT Trading Co Ltd to act as its agent in negotiating the shipment.
According to the NNAF, the documents were collected by environmental protection unions in Russia and Japan.
Russia's Kurchatov Institute, a nuclear-research center, is said to have agreed to bury 200,000 barrels of Taipower's nuclear waste on Sakhalin Island over a period of 10 years.
Taipower would pay US$800 million for the storage and another US$2.5 billion to have the storage site built, according to the Russian environmental group Ecodefense, which published news of the alleged transaction on the Ecoline Web site.
Russia military aircraft, carrying 180 barrels on each flight, would fly the waste from Taiwan to Russia, the report said.
Ecodefense said the vice chairman of the Duma had promised to lobby parliamentarians to get President Vladimir Putin to change the Nature Protection Law to allow foreign nuclear waste to be shipped into Russia.
Hiroo Komura (
"Amending the Nature Protection Law will probably take place in September," he said.
The Fourth Nuclear Power Plant will adopt a system developed in Japan called the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR). Many Japanese facilities use ABWRs, including the nuclear plant at Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture, which has suffered a string of embarrassing accidents and reactor shutdowns.
Tadao Yabe (
"Our nuclear plant's No. 6 ABWR, which went online at 1996, has been shut down five times because of accidents. The No. 7 ABWR, which began operations in 1997, has been stopped three times for similar reasons. This type of reactor is still in the testing stage," he said.
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