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.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching