Taitung County Government has no plans to sign a contract with state-run Taipower Power Company (Taipower) to build the nation's first permanent radioactive repository in its area of jurisdiction, County Commissioner Hsu Ching-yuan (徐慶元) said yesterday.
Chinese-language media reported yesterday that the Ministry of Economic Affairs, which supervises Taipower, would sign a contract with the Taitung County Government by the end of this year in order to fulfill a promise made by President Chen Shui-bian (
In April, Chen promised to find a solution to problems relating to the removal of an interim repository on Orchid Island, which is officially part of Taitung County.
Currently, nearly 100,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste from nuclear plants, hospitals and research institutes are stored there -- despite long-running protests from the island's Aboriginal residents.
According to the report, Taitung County authorities said an agreement would be reached -- if Taipower adopted advanced storage methods, reduced the amount of waste being stored and offered adequate compensation.
Yesterday, Hsu denied the report and said that that he'd never heard of any agreement between the county government and Taipower.
"On this issue, I give up playing the role of coordinator between the area residents and the central government," Hsu said.
Taitung Council speaker Wu Chun-li (
"But we don't rule out the possibility of turning the interim one on Orchid Island into a permanent one. It needs to be further discussed," Wu said.
Taipower officials said yesterday that it was too early to say the repository would be built in Taitung County due to the lack of any legal basis for doing so. A draft bill outlining regulations for choosing the site of a final repository for low-level radioactive waste is still waiting for legislative approval.
"Without the approval of these regulations, we can't make a final decision to designate a site as a permanent home for low-level radioactive waste," said Huang Huei-yu (
According to Taipower, after the legislation is passed, the repository would not be completed for at least five years. Taipower says it would take that long to select an appropriate site, conduct environmental impact assessments, design the repository and then finally build it.
Taipower's preliminary scheme is to have repositories built in four remote mountainous townships in Taitung County, including Tawu, Tajen, Taimali and Chinfeng.
A previous project to build the repository on the offshore islet of Wuchiu, in Kinmen County, was reportedly abandoned after spending NT$700 million on a feasibility assessment.
Concerns about the islet's proximity to China's Fujian Province finally put the brakes on the project.
Huang said none of the proposed projects to ship low-level radioactive waste abroad had been officially terminated. Possible foreign destinations for the waste included North Korea, Russia, China and the Marshall Islands.
"If any of them can meet our demands, we will apply for an export permit from the Atomic Energy Council," Huang said.
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