Safety inspections on the nation’s nearly completed Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in Gongliao District (貢寮), New Taipei City (新北市), are expected to run through June, with the relevant report and documents to be delivered to the Atomic Energy Council by the end of September, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said.
The announcement came after Minister of Economic Affairs Chang Chia-juch (張家祝) on Tuesday chaired the latest meeting of a team of experts charged with ensuring the safety of the plant.
The team of more than 70 local and foreign experts began their inspections on a total of 126 systems at the facility in May last year.
So far they have given their approval to 100 of them, with improvements being made on 21 others, the ministry said.
Five more systems have either not yet been handed over to the team for inspection or are waiting to be inspected after their handover, the ministry added.
Beginning in June last year, the team reran tests already carried out by Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) on 231 procedures. To date, 154 of the procedures have been completed.
The ministry said it hopes the council will finish its review of all the relevant documents in three months so that Taipower can obtain permission to install fuel rods at the plant by the end of this year.
The ministry has also said it hopes the plant will obtain a license to begin commercial operations after a year-long trial run, which is expected to end late next year.
The safety inspections were initiated in an effort to ease widespread concern among the public after the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster triggered by the earthquake and tsunami which struck northeastern Japan in March 2011.
The plant’s construction began in 1999, but it remains incomplete, due partly to Taiwan’s changing political climate, in which advocacy of nuclear power is highly unpopular.
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:
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