The US government should take back all spent fuel rods it sold to Taiwan to avoid further damaging the environment and people's health, said residents living in the shadow of two Taipei County nuclear plants yesterday.
Taiwan's first and second nuclear power plants, which have been in operation for more than 20 years, are home to 1,657 tonnes of spent fuel rods.
Waving banners, hundreds of locals from nearby townships, including Chinshan, Wanli, Shihmen and Sanchi gathered at a Wanli resort where Taiwanese government officials and representatives of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) were participating in an international conference on corporate-responsibility issues.
Residents performed a skit accusing the US government of failing to deal with Taiwan's spent fuel rods. Taiwan has imported fuel rods from the US since the 1970s.
The protesters handed AFL-CIO representatives a petition letter describing local anger at irreversible damages to the environment and public health caused by the storage of the highly radioactive rods.
"We hope the influential labor federation will deliver our message to US President [George W.] Bush," said resident representative Hsu Fu-hsiung (
The AFL-CIO, a voluntary federation of unions in the US, represents more than 13 million workers nationwide.
Tang Shu (唐曙), secretary-general of the Labor Rights Association (勞動人權協會), a resident support group, said the US should take back spent fuel rods to a final repository under construction in Nevada.
"In the name of anti-terrorism, the US should do this to prevent spent fuel rods from being reprocessed secretly," Tang said.
Used fuel rods, which contain plutonium and other dangerous radionuclides, are considered one source of nuclear weapons.
Atomic Energy Council (AEC) officials said all spent fuel rods were safely stored under at least 6m of water by the Taiwan Power Company (Taipower).
In addition to the 1,657 tonnes of spent fuel rods in Taipei County, 650 tonnes are stored at the Third Nuclear Power Plant in southern Taiwan.
The depositories in Taipei County, however, will be full by 2016.
As spent fuel pools at many nuclear reactors begin to fill up AEC's Fuel Cycle and Materials Administration Director Ray Wu (
"Taiwan will ultimately build a final repository for high-level radioactive waste because everybody else in the world is doing so," said Wu, adding that US laws prohibit the import of spent fuel rods.
Wu said Taipower had gathered information about advanced technologies for building final repositories from the US, Finland, Sweden, France, the UK and Germany.
Wu said that Taiwan will have to deal with 4,917 tonnes of spent fuel rods after three operational nuclear plants are decommissioned. If the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant operates for 40 years, Wu said, the amount would be increased up to about 8,000 tonnes.
If regional cooperation works, Wu said, Taiwan would be willing to send its nuclear waste to any available final repositories in nearby advanced countries.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods