Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) plans to ship its spent nuclear fuel overseas for reprocessing, possibly to France, Minister of Economic Affairs John Deng (鄧振中) reiterated yesterday.
Deng made the remark in response to a question from Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chen Ou-po (陳歐珀) during a question-and-answer session at the Legislative Yuan.
Taiwan’s three operational nuclear power plants had, as of January, produced 17,552 spent fuel rods, and the number will grow as long as the plants remain in service, the lawmaker said.
Since Taipower is not able to handle high-level nuclear waste, the waste should be shipped to the US, since US companies built the three operational nuclear plants and supplied the nuclear fuel, the lawmaker said.
Deng said the state-owned utility has a plan to send nuclear waste overseas for reprocessing, adding that France is willing to do it.
During the meeting, Premier Simon Chang (張善政) apologized on behalf of the government to the residents of Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) for failing to honor its promise to remove nuclear waste from the island.
A nuclear waste storage facility was built on Lanyu in 1982, but the islands residents, most of whom are Tao Aborigines, have staged protests for years demanding that Taipower remove the waste.
In related news, the DPP yesterday reiterated its objective of a nuclear-free nation by 2025 to mark the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster in Japan.
“Exploring [sources of] renewable energy and creating a nuclear-free homeland has always been the DPP’s ideology. It is not only an objective as stated in the Basic Environmental Act (環境基本法), but also the public’s consensus and a trend in global energy development,” DPP spokesperson Ruan Jhao-syong (阮昭雄) said in Taipei.
“When the new government is sworn in, we will actively move to fulfill our promise of creating a nuclear-free homeland by 2025,” he said.
To achieve the objective, the DPP insists that construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮) should be ceased, and the lifespans of the three operating plants not be extended, he said.
The DPP would also seek to strengthen the mechanism to react to a nuclear disaster, urge Taipower to research decommissioning the existing plants and continue to search for a suitable permanent nuclear waste storage facility, Ruan said.
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