Minister of Economic Affairs Shen Jong-chin (沈榮津) yesterday said the ministry would demand that Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) review its employee allocation policy at the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant after the state-run firm was revealed to have more than 500 employees working at the mothballed plant.
“It is necessary to have employees stationed at the power plant for routine maintenance and testing … but we only need a minimum headcount at the plant since it is not operating,” Shen told lawmakers during a question-and-answer session at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee.
The workforce issue arose after the Chinese-language Next Magazine published an article claiming that there are 550 employees at the mothballed plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮) being paid total annual wages of between NT$700 million and NT$800 million (US$23.18 million and US$26.49 million).
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
The nuclear power plant was mothballed by the government after protests against its operation in 2014.
Taipower president Chung Bin-li (鐘炳利) told lawmakers that the annual personnel expense at the plant is about NT$700 million and the number of employees has been reduced from 550 at the end of last year to 360.
Given that the plant is not operating, Taipower plans to continue cutting the number of employees to fewer than 300 next year, Chung said.
Taipower has approached power plant operators in Europe, the US and Japan about selling the nuclear power plant’s assets, but it is not easy to find a potential buyer, he said.
Nonetheless, the Ministry of Economic Affairs has given Taipower a deadline for disposing of the assets while they are still valuable, Shen said, without disclosing the time frame.
Meanwhile, the ministry estimates that the average electricity rate would increase by NT$0.5 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) by 2025, due to the growing use of the higher-cost renewable energy as the nation phases out the use of nuclear energy.
However, the electricity rates for households that consume less than 330kWh of electricity per month would likely remain unchanged, as President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has promised to take care of economically disadvantaged households, Shen said.
The government’s goal is the grow the contribution from “green” energy to 20 percent, natural gas to 50 percent and coal to 30 percent, in a bid to achieve a nuclear-free energy policy by 2025, the ministry said.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has