A public opinion survey released yesterday showed that Taiwanese are more opposed to the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s (新北市) Gongliao District (貢寮) than the use of nuclear energy in general, with nearly 60 percent of respondents saying they opposed completing the construction of the plant and 50 percent saying they were against nuclear power.
The survey was conducted by Taiwan Indicator Survey Research between Wednesday and Thursday last week, and focused on nuclear issues. The poll followed nationwide anti-nuclear demonstrations that drew 200,000 participants over the weekend and was released yesterday on the second anniversary of the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in 2011.
When asked about Taiwan’s use of nuclear energy, the poll found that 52.5 percent of respondents did not disapprove of keeping the three nuclear power plants currently in operation running, but did not want any new plants to be built, with 18.5 percent saying that all nuclear power plants should be shut down, 12 percent supporting the construction of new plants and 17 percent saying they had no opinion on the matter.
Half of those polled said they disapproved of using nuclear power as a source of energy, with 29 percent expressing “strong disapproval,” compared with the 34.3 percent of respondents who were in favor of nuclear power and 15.7 percent who said they were undecided.
When asked about continuing the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, 58 percent of respondents said construction should be stopped, while 25.1 percent said the project should be completed and 16.9 percent abstained from answering.
A breakdown of the poll results found that more than half of the 58 percent of those surveyed who supported suspending construction of the plant — which represented 34.7 percent of all respondents — advocated permanently stopping construction.
Meanwhile, 16.8 percent of respondents favored a temporary suspension and making the final decision after a safety check is carried out, with 6.5 percent agreeing that the project should be temporarily stalled, but that a national referendum should decide the matter.
The majority of the 25.1 percent of those polled who favored completing the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant — 23.1 percent — said the plant should operate after it is finished, with the remaining 2 percent saying it should not be made operational after it is built.
The results showed that the public is more skeptical about the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant specifically, than nuclear energy in general, Taiwan Indicator Survey Research general manager Tai Li-an (戴立安) said, adding that the survey seemed to suggest that opposition to the project and nuclear energy were viewed as two separate issues by many people.
The survey collected 1,007 valid samples and had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
The Council of Agriculture yesterday signed a Taiwan-Australia Agricultural Cooperation Implementation clause to open a new export market for the nation’s pineapple crop. The clause is an addition to existing cooperation measures, it said. China on Friday last week abruptly announced that it would suspend pineapple imports from Taiwan starting on Monday, on grounds that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful organisms” in shipments of the fruit. The public and private sectors have since joined hands to purchase the local fruit to help the nation’s pineapple farmers. Canberra has requested that all pineapples for export to Australia have their crown buds removed,
Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group might have lost its right to distribute the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 and the ability to fulfill a contract in Taiwan, civic groups Taiwan Citizen Front and the Economic Democracy Union said yesterday. In a radio interview on Feb. 17, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), head of the Central Epidemic Command Center, said that last year, Taiwan was close to signing a contract to buy doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but that the deal was halted at the last moment, with some speculating that Chinese interference was to blame. On Monday last week, the center
A Tainan taxi driver is the Taiwanese with the longest name, after he last month changed it so that it now contains 25 characters, the Anping District Household Registration Office said. The 47-year-old man, formerly known as Huang Hsin-hsiang (黃鑫翔), applied for the name change on Feb. 26, in the hope that it would bring him good luck. His new name starts with Huang Da-lan (黃大嵐) and adds another 22 characters, meaning “Huang Da-lan is the blessed darling and sweetheart of the god of joy, god of wealth, god of misfortune, god of Earth and all the gods,” it said. With
Broadcasting Corp of China chairman Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康) yesterday said that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) “should not follow the Democratic Progressive Party’s [DPP] direction,” after KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) had said that China posed a threat to Taiwan. Chiang was quoted by Reuters as saying during an interview that China’s “one country, two systems” formula for an unification with Taiwan “has no market” in the nation. Chiang also described China as the major threat to Taiwan, Reuters reported. Jaw, who has expressed interest in running for KMT chairman this year and in the 2024 presidential election, wrote on Facebook that
RSS