State-owned Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) yesterday said that the No. 1 reactor at the country’s first nuclear power plant may have to go offline sooner than expected because of limited storage space for spent nuclear fuel.
Taipower opened a tender for foreign companies on the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel from the nation’s first and second nuclear power plants, but withdrew it on April 2 amid a budget controversy.
Taipower had allocated NT$11.257 billion (US$360.3 million) for reprocessing 1,200 clusters of spent fuel rods overseas, 300 of which were to be shipped out by the end of the year.
However, lawmakers failed to approve the budget last month, saying that Taipower and the Ministry of Economic Affairs were trying to initiate a bidding process with foreign firms without legislative oversight and were accessing the nuclear back-end management fund before the establishment of legal guidelines for its use.
Taipower said it would continue to negotiate with lawmakers in the hope that the budget could be approved before the legislative session ends late next month.
However, Taipower said that if the fuel storage problem is not resolved in time, the No. 1 reactor at the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Shihmen District (石門) would have to go offline in the middle of next year.
The plant is not scheduled to begin decommissioning until 2018 and to finish it in 2023.
The reactor has been down since December last year because of a component failure and the Atomic Energy Council has not yet given approval for it to be put back in service.
Taipower has said that it is aiming to have the reactor up and running as soon as possible.
Having the reactor out of service increases the risk of power shortages, Taipower said.
The storage space problem also exists at the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant — the nation’s second — in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里), which has the same decommission schedule as Jinshan, Taipower said.
Several groups — including Mom Loves Taiwan and Green Citizens’ Action Alliance — have protested against Taipower’s proposed reprocessing plan, saying it is “absurd” to consider sending fuel rods overseas for reprocessing, since the nation should be phasing out nuclear energy.
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