The Cabinet-level Atomic Energy Council (AEC) criticized the Taiwan Power Company (Taipower, 台電) yesterday for delays in transferring radioactive waste on Orchid Island to new barrels.
"We are unsatisfied with Taipower's performance in preparing for its re-barreling project at the site," Chiou Syh-tsong (
Chiou said Taipower should begin transferring the waste to new barrels by June 2004.
Between May 1982 and May 1996, 97,672 barrels of low-level radioactive waste were sent to the interim radioactive repository, which covers 1km2 of the island.
According to the AEC, which supervises Taipower's nuclear-related work, only 3,200 barrels have been put into new drums.
AEC officials said it remains uncertain when the final repository for the low-level radioactive waste would be built, but transferring the waste to new barrels should have not been delayed like this.
Taipower attributed the delay to local opposition, which prevented Taipower from shipping new stainless steel barrels to the island in 2000 and last year, AEC officials said.
"We will push Taipower to carry out the project by June 2004 anyway and shorten the time expected to finish it," Chiou said, adding that Taipower estimated that project might take seven years.
According to the AEC, before launching the project, Taipower would first have to build three facilities, but that it had started on only two of them.
One is a mobile room which could extract barrels stored underground. The other facility being built is a treatment center, where broken barrels will be reinforced with cement and polluted barrels decontaminated.
AEC officials said that it would press Taipower to apply for a construction license for building a closed depository, where re-barreled waste could be stored before it is relocated.
Chiou said that a Cabinet-level commission being established to tackle the relocation project might be able to reduce the time it will take to re-barrel the waste and move it to a permanent repository.
Chiou yesterday stressed that Taipower's idea to build the nation's first final repository for low-level radioactive waste on a small islet in Wuchiu (
"No country in the world builds repositories for low-level radioactive waste near its borders," Chiou said. "We prefer to follow international precedent."
The AEC's Radiation Monitoring Center released the results yesterday of analysis of 300 samples it had taken from the island.
The results suggested that the exposure rate on the island was found to be between 0.037 and 0.052 micro-Sv per hour, which is within the acceptable variation of background environmental radiation.
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