Japanese geologist Shiosaka Kunio, who has been researching the impact of geological composition on the safety of buildings for the past 30 years, said yesterday he has discovered a new fault along the coast in Taipei County’s Gongliao Township (貢寮) and warned that it could jeopardize the safety of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, especially when earthquakes occur.
“There is a fault of at least 1km long running from north to south through the fishing harbor in Aodi Village (澳底), very close to the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant,” he told a press conference at the legislature in Taipei.
An initial measuring of the laccoliths — masses of igneous rock intruded between layers of sedimentary rock — separated by the fault found that there is a 3m difference in height between them, he said.
“You can see that there are some cracks on the levee of the harbor caused by the laccoliths moving,” Shiosaka said, pointing to a picture of the levee. “Although I don’t know the exact year in which the decades-old levee was built, the cracks indicate that the fault is still an active one.”
Besides the newly discovered fault, there are already two known faults near the nuclear power plant.
Citing the example of how the operations of a nuclear power plant in Shizuoka, Japan, had to be ceased because of damage to the plant caused by an earthquake in January, the geologist warned that an earthquake may also threaten the safety of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant.
He said that the safety of nuclear power plants should be carefully handled, as nuclear energy is still not a mature technology.
“I’m surprised that the fault along the coast was not discovered earlier and was not included in the environmental impact assessment before the construction of the nuclear power plant,” Shiosaka said.
Green Citizens’ Action Alliance secretary-general Tsui Su-hsin (崔傃欣) said the group had invited Shiosaka to Taiwan because several Shizuoka councilors had expressed worries about how close the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant is to residential areas when they visited earlier this year.
While the government and Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) plan to put uranium fuel into the reactors at the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in December for a test operation, environmentalists are worried because several accidents — many of which could have caused a serious problem during normal operations — have occurred since a test operation without uranium started in March.
The alliance urged Taipower to allow a thorough geological investigation by a third party and to halt the plan to test with uranium before all possible threats to the plant’s safety have been analyzed.
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:
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