A group of Taiwanese legislators paid a visit to a permanent nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada Thursday in an effort to collect tips on handling radioactive waste.
Accompanied by officials from the US Department of Energy, the lawmakers, headed by Legislator Chiu Yung-jen (邱永仁) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), spent several hours touring the Yucca Mountain Repository, located about 160km northwest of Las Vegas, and being briefed by the facility's authorities.
According to these authorities, the nuclear waste dump is built in an area not only far from densely populated cities but also an area where geological conditions is stable, making it suitable for storage of hazardous materials.
So far, they said, the Department of Energy has spent US$8 billion developing the underground dump, which is planned to be fully completed in 10 years. After it is finished, the Yucca Mountain Repository will be used to store all nuclear reactors and radioactive waste that is currently stored in 131 smaller facilities scattered across the US. It is estimated that it will remain safe for 10,000 years.
Nuclear power plants provide about 20 percent of the electricity used in the US.
Chiu said the visit by the legislators, all members of the Legislative Yuan's Science and Information Technology Committee, is aimed at emulating the US experience and working out a policy that will solve Taiwan's nuclear waste problems once and for all.
State-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) has in recent years prepared to remove over 97,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste from Lanyu (
The waste, produced by Taipower's three nuclear power plants over 20 years, is scheduled to be inspected and repacked by the end of 2010.
Taipower has contacted authorities from home and abroad for the treatment and disposal of its nuclear waste over the past several years, including Russia, North Korea and Taiwan's outlying islet of Wuchiu.
After the visit to Yucca Mountain, Chiu and his group proceeded to the Hoover Dam, also in Nevada, to see whether Taiwan can borrow any ideas from the dam that can help Taiwan streamline water conservation and related efforts.
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
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
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