The two new Cabinet appointees who will be most closely involved with the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant (核四) continued yesterday to demonstrate their strong support for the resumption of the project.
Former Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) head Lin Jun-yi (林俊義) yesterday handed over the reins of leadership to Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), saying that success in environmental protection work depended not on any particular individual but on a "professional team like the EPA staff."
The decision on whether or not to redo the nuclear plant's environmental impact assessment (EIA) is now one of the big challenges facing Hau.
PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YING, TAIPEI TIMES
Yesterday afternoon Hau visited the different party caucuses in the legislature to solicit support for himself in his new position as EPA head.
DPP legislators, however, reminded Hau of the need to be impartial when he considers the assessment.
When Hau announced that he would take the EPA post on March 4, he stressed that his support for the resumption of construction of the plant would not waver.
Hau later responded to the DPP legislators' remarks at the New Party caucus office.
He said he wanted to stress that "on the EIA issue, the EPA will behave in accordance with the law."
It had previously been widely reported that Hau had said that he would not consider redoing the plant's assessment because he believed that calls for it to be redone were simply a delaying tactic on the part of the DPP.
Since the Cabinet reshuffle was finalized, the DPP caucus in the Legislative Yuan has called upon both Hau and new Atomic Energy Council (AEC) Chairman Hu Chin-piao (胡錦標) to take heed of censures related to the plant issued by the Control Yuan in 1999.
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The appointment of Cabinet figures in favor of the plant has further reduced the likelihood that the decision to resume construction will be reversed.
AEC Chairman Hu said yesterday that a planned final repository for low-level radioactive waste on Wuchiu island (烏坵鄉), Kinmen County, might be one solution to the waste problems.
Hu said that AEC officials were confident in radioactive waste disposal technologies and that he would seek support for the plan from Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (
In terms of environmental protection, however, whether Taipower will receive approval for the repository remains to be seen.
The EPA reviewed the assessment for the repository on March 5 for the first time.
However, because the meeting was chaired by a former EPA political appointee, deputy administrator James Lee (李界木), who was about to step down with former EPA head Lin, no final decision was made.
The EPA's EIA committee members, however, told the Taipei Times yesterday that most of them were far from satisfied with the assessment proposal.
They demanded that Taipower supply further information within one month.
"Some of us actually suggested in the meeting that the report should have been killed," Yang Chao-yueh (楊肇岳), one of the committee members, told the Taipei Times.
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The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
Taiwan climbed to its highest position in global export rankings in more than three decades last year, buoyed by demand linked to artificial intelligence (AI) that lifted shipments of semiconductors and technology products, Ministry of Finance data released yesterday showed. Taiwan accounted for 2.4 percent of global exports last year, or about US$640 billion, ranking 12th worldwide, the data showed. That was up four places from a year earlier and marked the nation’s best ranking since 1994, the ministry said. Taiwan’s share of global exports rose by 0.5 percentage points from the previous year, the largest increase among major economies, reflecting the nation’s
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
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