Anti-nuclear activists in Taipei County's Kungliao township -- home of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant -- say that the government's plans to turn Taiwan into a nuclear-free homeland have been muddled and its performance inconsistent.
"We are confused. The government is promoting the idea of building a nuclear-free homeland and continuing the construction of a nuclear power plant at the same time," Wu Wen-tung (吳文通), spokesman for the Kungliao-based Yenliao Anti-Nuclear Self-Help Association, said yesterday.
The Cabinet had originally planned to hold the first National Nuclear-free Homeland Conference next week, but postponed it due to the spread of SARS.
However, next Monday -- the very day the conference was to take place -- the Taiwan Power Company (Taipower), supervised by the Cabinet's Ministry of Economic Affairs, will go ahead with the transfer of one of the two nuclear reactors to Kungliao.
The reactors are being built in Japan and shipped to Taiwan. But in order to avoid provoking anti-nuclear demonstrations in Japan, the reactors will be exported from the Port of Kure (吳港), a military port in Hiroshima Prefecture, Wu said.
However residents in the Kungliao area, including fishermen and representatives of local groups, would cooperate to block all possible sea routes in order to prevent the reactor from being loaded at a wharf near the construction site, Wu said.
Since April, workshops and preparatory meetings have been held island-wide for experts, environmentalists, and residents to come up with strategies to phase out nuclear energy.
Last week, it was announced that the the nuclear-free conference would be postponed until June 27. Cabinet officials said yesterday that the delay was purely due to the spread of SARS and not because of any obstacles the government had encounter in its efforts to promote turning Taiwan into a nuclear-free homeland.
As of yesterday, officials said, Japanese nuclear experts are the only people to have promised to attend the conference. Currently, the Cabinet is desperately contacting experts in other fields, such as renewable energy, in Sweden, the US and Germany.
Officials said there would be no change in topics to be discussed -- which included the decommissioning of existing nuclear plants, disposal of radioactive waste and re-evaluating the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant.
The Cabinet's intention to bring forward the dates for decommissioning the three active nuclear power plants has provoked Taipower workers, who have accused the government of neglecting their right to work.
Yesterday at the Legislative Yuan, a dozen of representatives of Taiwan Power Labor Union expressed their opposition to the governments plans to retire three operational nuclear plants and hold a national plebiscite on the future of the fourth plant.
The director-general of the union, Shih Chao-hsien (施朝賢), stressed the importance of nuclear power plants, saying that they accounted for 22 percent of the total power generation in Taiwan.
"Earlier decommissioning of active nuclear plants and halting the construction of the one under construction will lead to an additional NT$5 million expenditure annually, making a price-hike within a 15 percent range inevitable," Shih said.
Meanwhile, unsolved problems pertaining to the disposal of radioactive waste prompted a demonstration conducted by more than 100 anti-nuclear activists outside the Taitung County Council building yesterday.
Activists protested against Taitung County Commissioner Hsu Ching-yuan (徐慶元), who is in favor of a project to build Taiwan's first permanent repository for low-level radioactive waste in the county's Tawu (大武) township.
In April, Hsu said that Taitung would not "shirk its social responsibility," if no other places were willing to accommodate radioactive waste.
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