A coffee shop owner has recently launched an event through Facebook for stores nationwide to hang up a 90cm by 120cm flag reading: “NO NUKES, No More Fukushima” on Double Ten National Day.
Saying he is not a radical social activist, the coffee shop owner, who declined to be named, said: “One has to keep in mind that should something happen to a nuclear power plant, everything that we hold dear and have worked hard for would disappear.”
In the wake of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster in Japan and the discovery of broken anchor bolts in the reactor container of the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in Wanli (萬里), New Taipei City (新北市), the coffee shop owner said he started to think about what actions he could take.
The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster — caused by an earthquake and the tsunami generated by the earthquake on March 11 last year — was the worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
The tsunami flooded the emergency electricity generators, which cut power to the pumps that circulated the coolant water for the reactor and caused full meltdowns of three out of the six reactors.
At the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant, meanwhile, it was discovered in March that seven out of 120 anchor bolts fixing the reactor’s side-skirt to the concrete base were either broken or had cracks, causing concerns over its safety.
The coffee shop owner said he finally thought of an idea: to create an anti-nuclear flag that is 90cm by 120cm in size, on which the words “NO NUKES, No More Fukushima” would be written, and then approach other shop owners via Facebook to invite them to join him in displaying the flag in their stores on Double Ten National Day.
At first, he only contacted owners of other independent coffee shops, he said, adding that he did not expect to see more than 100 stores participate in the event.
“The event doesn’t have a budget or any sponsor, it’s just a thought of mine hoping to flex some civilian muscle and put a spotlight on anti-nuclear events,” the owner said.
Meanwhile, Green Citizen Action Alliance secretary-general Tsuei Su-hsin (崔愫欣) said that shop owners who have signed up for the event were not politicians and were not affiliated with political parties.
“They are just people trying to protect what they have worked so hard to make and they are just normal people who want to have a life on this island,” Tsuei said, calling for more people to participate in the anti-nuclear event.
The owner who initiated the event estimates that each store who joins the event would have to pay NT$150 for the manufacture and delivery of the flag and said the alliance would be taking orders for the flags up until the end of the month.
The plan is to finish producing the flags by Sept. 15 and begin delivering them to stores, the owner said, adding that there would also be locations across the nation where store owners could pick up the flags.
Any leftover funds at the conclusion of the event would be donated to the alliance, the owner added.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,