Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) said yesterday it is still considering filing an appeal against a court ruling it lost after the Atomic Energy Council (AEC) charged the firm with making arbitrary changes to the design of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in Gongliao District (貢寮), New Taipei City (新北市).
The Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported yesterday that the Taipei High Administrative Court ruled against Taipower in an administrative lawsuit against the AEC, which imposed a fine of NT$15 million (US$500,000) on Taipower for violating Article 14 of the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Control Act (核子反應器設施管制法).
It said the AEC discovered that Taipower had arbitrarily altered as many as 700 parts of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant design, starting in 2010.
The Liberty Times report also said that Taipower claimed the changes had to be made as the result of a contract dispute with US-based General Electric, the plant’s designer, and that they would not affect safety at the plant, but that the court did not accept the company’s explanation.
In response to the court ruling, Taipower chief nuclear energy engineer and spokesperson Chai Fu-feng (蔡富豐) said the company had not decided whether it would appeal the ruling and that most of the changes made to the design had been approved by the original manufacturer.
“They [General Electric] have approved most of our methods [for altering the design],” Chai said, adding that the changes had been made before General Electric could review them because Taipower did not want to set back the construction schedule and that about 97 percent of the alterations had since been approved by the US firm.
Taipower is still communicating with General Electric on the other 3 percent, Chai said.
In addition, Taipower said it has already asked specialists to conduct a safety risk assessment on the altered design of the nuclear power plant to ensure that it is safe.
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
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
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