President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has promised to respond within a week to public concerns over environmental problems, especially the issue of nuclear power, seven representatives of environmental non-governmental organizations (NGO) said after a meeting with the president on Earth Day yesterday.
Homemakers United Foundation president Chen Man-li (陳曼麗) said they told the president that the fate of the controversial Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in Gongliao (貢寮), New Taipei City (新北市), should not be decided by a national referendum.
She said they also urged that the high threshold for passing a referendum be amended, that the question in the planned referendum be rephrased to whether construction “should be continued,” that a 30km radius “escape zone” from the nuclear plants be established, and that the proposed law on the promotion of a nuclear-free homeland be enacted.
“I told the president that the Fourth Nuclear Plant project should be scrapped immediately, rather than waste so much taxpayers’ money to hold a referendum,” Gongliao Anti-Nuclear Self-Help Association member and Taiwan Environmental Protection Union’s (TEPU) northeastern branch director Wu Wen-chang (吳文樟) said.
“While the three operating nuclear power plants generate about 16 percent of the total electricity supply in Taiwan and the new plant will supply about 6 percent after the three plants are retired, we have more than 20 percent power reserves at present, so I told the president that we won’t have a power shortage problem even if we stop them all at once,” he said.
He said Ma also gave his verbal consent to his proposal to allow Gongliao residents to participate in future visits to the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant construction site, after the self-help association members’ proposal to meet Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) was rejected when he visited the plant on Wednesday.
Citizen’s Congress Watch executive director Chang Hung-lin (張宏林) said he suggested that legislators — as well as citizens — should be able to vote according to their own will on the referendum proposal, rather than conform to an order issued by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus, but Ma did not respond to the suggestion.
Chen said Ma agreed that their suggestion to hold a national energy conference to discuss future energy policy directions may help the public better understand Taiwan’s energy situation.
As for other questions and suggestions, Ma said he would ask concerned government agencies to give them a response within a week.
In addition to nuclear power issues, the groups suggested enacting laws on wetlands and ocean conservation, improving the nation’s self-sufficiency rate in food and food safety, re-evaluating development projects along the eastern coastline and improving public animal shelters and reducing the rate of stray animals put to death.
They said that if the government agencies’ response
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