The former chairman of France’s independent agency on regulating nuclear safety said yesterday that Taiwan is applying some of the safety measures France has launched since Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear crisis in 2011.
Speaking at a forum in Taipei on nuclear safety, Andre-Claude Lacoste, who stepped down as Nuclear Safety Authority chairman last year, said France has been introducing a series of measures to raise nuclear power safety standards, such as more extensive assessments of nuclear facilities.
Through a close bilateral partnership, he said, Taiwan has applied two out of the 800 new safety requirements France has outlined in the wake of the nuclear disaster in Japan.
The measures include the installation of an emergency cooling water supply and an additional electricity generator for each of Taiwan’s nuclear reactors, Lacoste said.
“A continuous improvement process is necessary, in addition to periodic checks on nuclear facilities,” he said.
Lacoste’s visit comes amid increasingly heated debate in recent weeks on whether the controversial Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s (新北市) Gongliao District (貢寮) should begin operating. He was set to conclude his visit today.
Democratic Progressive Party Chairman Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) recently said that he will propose a referendum on the fate of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, while President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) pledged that the plant would not begin operating before the most rigid of safety standards have been met.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
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