As the issue of a referendum on the future of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant is heating up, residents from Taitung County, a potential site for the nation's first permanent repository for low-level radioactive waste, yesterday demanded a similar referendum on the waste issue.
More than 100 residents from Tawu Township (
PHOTO: SEAN CHAO, TAIPEI TIMES
"We local residents will be the most affected by the repository. The project should be decided by ourselves," said Li Chin-huei (李錦慧), a county councilman.
Li said the repository should not be built unless the county council approves it or the result of a referendum is in favor of it.
Petitions carried out by Tawu residents yesterday were supported by diverse social and political groups, including the Association for Promoting Public Voting on Nuke 4 (
"When we are talking about the future of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, we have to consider waste disposal problems as a whole," said DPP Legislator Eugene Jao (
Residents of Kungliao Township, Taipei County, where the plant is located, said that it was unfair to have other nations decide the future of local people.
"People living far away and using electric power conveniently will never realize our panic," said Wu Wen-tung (吳文通), spokesman for the Kungliao-based Yenliao Anti-Nuclear Self-Help Association.
Wu said a regional referendum on the future of the plant was acceptable.
Anti-nuclear activists today will protest in front of the Office of the President to express their anger.
In April, President Chen Shui-bian (
Nearly 100,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, hospitals and research institutes are stored on the island.
At that time, Taitung County Magistrate Hsu Ching-yuan (
However, the county council was against the idea.
Anti-nuclear residents said they suspected that several groups could be profiting from supporting the project.
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
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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