Anti-nuclear activists said yesterday that the cost of completing construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant (
Fighting back against a claim made by the Taiwan Power Company (Taipower, 台電) last month -- that said that halting construction of the plant would result in a loss of at least NT$86.4 billion -- economists from the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union (TEPU) provided the media with capital costs of three operating nuclear power plants to highlight the "unrealistic economics" of nuclear energy.
"Based on Taipower's history of requesting additional budgets to get previous nuclear plants online, we estimate that the financial burden for completing the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant would be at least NT$530 billion," said Wang To-far (
Wang said that final costs incurred completing the second and third nuclear power plants were 2.8 and 2.5 times the initial estimated costs respectively.
"The reasons given by Taipower for these anomalies were pathetic, such as rising costs due to inflation and ever-rising technical consultancy fees," said Shih Shin-min (施信民), TEPU's former head and a professor of chemical engineering at National Taiwan University (NTU).
Research conducted by another TEPU member, Kao Cheng-yan (高成炎), a professor of information engineering at NTU, showed the final costs of building nuclear plants in the US were on average three times the initial estimated costs.
"No such plants were built in the US after 1977 because the business sector realized the fallacy behind the economics of nuclear power," Kao concluded, after analyzing US business statistics compiled between 1966 and 1977.
Wang suggested abandoning the controversial project because of the prohibitive economics, which, apart from construction costs, must include other parameters, such as the plant's eventual decommissioning cost and costs for treating the radioactive waste it will produce over its working lifetime.
According to the TEPU's research, the cost of managing a closed nuclear power plant is at least 1.5 times its construction cost.
TEPU members showed that a US power company had to spend US$333 million to manage Fort St Vrain Nuclear Generating Station in Colorado when it was decommissioned in 1995, while the construction cost when it was launched in September 1968, totalled only US$224 million.
"However," Wang said, "the real cost could be higher than I estimated if we consider other social costs, such as the negative impact on coastal ecosystems, declining economic benefits from local fisheries, and other cultural effects."
Anti-nuclear activists said that hidden government expenditure on encouraging the development of the nuclear industry was difficult to estimate.
Shih said that the annual budget for the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research, an Atomic Energy Council research center, was about NT$30 million, which was far more funding than other energy research units are receiving.
Anti-nuclear activists said that the Ministry of Economic Affairs -- which has said it would announce the names of members of a review committee for the project next week -- should consider many factors when estimating the "total social cost" (
"Improving the efficiency of power generation and reducing wasted energy would be a far more pragmatic economic approach for Taiwan," Wang said.
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