The government is planning to send spent nuclear fuel from two of the nation’s nuclear power plants overseas for redisposal, in a bid to help solve the impending waste storage problem as spent fuel pools reach maximum capacity.
Economic officials said that state-owned Taiwan Power Co (Taipower), which manages the nation’s three operating nuclear plants, is to start inviting bidders early next year, with the aim of starting to send the fuel overseas in small batches.
The total volume of the radioactive waste being considered for the plan fills about 1,200 fuel clusters, they said, declining to say where the cargo might be shipped.
The move is expected to solve the problem of the fuel pool at the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Shihmen District (石門) approaching capacity. If the issue is not dealt with, it could force the facility to be shut down and decommissioned a few years earlier than scheduled.
The decommissioning of the Jinshan plant and New Taipei City’s other atomic facility, the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in Wanli District (萬里), is expected to begin in 2018 and be completed by 2023.
The government has been building a new dry storage facility to store spent fuel domestically, but the project has fallen behind schedule.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs suggested that if the facility is not ready by the expected deadline, the Jinshan and Guosheng plants could be forced to terminate operations because their spent fuel pools will be full by about March 2016.
The ministry and Taipower are therefore looking at the practices of other countries to promote the redisposal plan.
The updated Taiwan-US Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy Agreement, which took effect in June, permits the nation to send spent nuclear fuel overseas for redisposal.
The ministry said that the processing of the radioactive fuel would turn 97 percent of the fuel rods into reusable plutonimum and uranium, while the remaining 3 percent would be nuclear waste.
Under the scheme, the plutonium and uranium would not be shipped back to Taiwan, but resold by the redisposal facility. The remaining waste would then be solidified to reduce its radioactivity and after radioactive decay, it would shrink to one-fourth or one-fifth of its original size. It would then be sent back to Taiwan after being stored at the disposal plant for about 20 years.
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