Legislators slammed the Atomic Energy Council’s (AEC) nuclear disaster drill as “role-playing” and questioned the extent of evacuation zones during a review of the council’s nuclear emergency response fund yesterday.
The Education and Culture Committee reviewed the council’s budget proposal related to nuclear emergency prevention and response measures, saying some items were poorly executed and some were bloated.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chung Chia-pin (鍾佳濱) said he had taken part in four nuclear disaster drills, but they were like “role-playing,” in which soldiers were ordered to put on swimming trunks and pretend to be tourists, instead of actual residents participating in the drills.
“The council’s drill plan failed to simulate the accommodation of tens of thousands of people evacuated from New Taipei City and Taipei, which would be a major problem in the event of a nuclear disaster,” Chung said.
DPP Legislator Cheng Li-chun (鄭麗君) questioned the scope of the evacuation zones, which the council set within an 8km radius from nuclear plants.
“Immediately after the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster in 2011, the Japanese government instructed residents living within 3km of the power plant to evacuate, but later expanded the area of evacuation to within a 20km radius of the reactor,” Cheng said, asking whether the AEC’s planned evacuation areas are large enough.
AEC Minister Chou Yuan-ching (周源卿) said the 8km evacuation area is already an expansion from the original 5km evacuation area and is calculated based on the range of nuclear fallout, while Japan ordered a larger evacuation area because the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant had six reactors, compared with Taiwan’s three nuclear plants that have only two reactors each.
About 2 million people would need to evacuate if areas of evacuation were expanded to 20km from the two New Taipei City power plants, Chou said.
DPP Legislator Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) said Taipei is located within 30km of two nuclear plants in New Taipei City, but the Taipei City Government has done little to improve emergency preparedness and only a handful of Taipei residents have participated in the council’s drills, so Taipei residents are not capable of responding to a nuclear disaster.
The committee also questioned the council’s other budget proposals that included organizing school fairs and public-relations training as well as issuing calendars, with the committee cutting certain budget items it deemed unnecessary.
“What is the use of the council’s ‘evacuation calendar’? Will residents take along a calendar when evacuating?” Cheng said.
The committee said the council should not spend funds on touting nuclear safety with public-relations programs, but on raising disaster prevention awareness among the public.
RISK FACTORS: ‘We hope people can cooperate and endure it ... it is possibly the very important last mile,’ Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung said Taiwan’s COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations are to remain the same next month, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday. The center reported 42,112 new local COVID-19 cases and 85 deaths, saying that the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has dropped to a new low this month. Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the CECC, said that the center is keeping COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations the same due to the local virus situation, and an increase in the number of imported cases of the new Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2, among other risk factors. Easing
TRAVEL CONFERENCE: Representatives from the two countries exchanged views on how to increase tourist numbers, with one identifying individual travel as a trend Taiwan and South Korea aim to increase the number of tourists traveling between the two countries to 3 million, government and tourism industry representatives said at a conference in Hsinchu City yesterday. The annual event was attended by Deputy Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Yen-po (陳彥伯); Tourism Bureau Director-General Chang Shi-chung (張錫聰); Taiwan Visitors Association chairwoman Yeh Chu-lan (葉菊蘭); South Korean Representative to Taiwan Chung Byung-won; Yoon Ji-sook, an official at the South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism; and Korea Association of Travel Agents chairman Oh Chang-hee. Global tourism is expected to soon rebound to between 55 and
DAMAGE CONTROL: The KMT in a statement called the Taiwan Strait ‘international waters,’ after Alexander Huang said China had the right to claim it as internal waters Lawmakers and experts yesterday accused the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) envoy to the US Alexander Huang (黃介正) of acting as China’s stooge, after he said that Beijing has the right to claim waters beyond its maritime territory as its exclusive economic zone and that the US has no legal basis to assert that the Taiwan Strait is an “international waterway.” Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu (王定宇) said in an online post that most of the world considers the Strait an international waterway, adding that this is important for safeguarding Taiwan. “We have seen US warships transiting through the Taiwan Strait.
The Taichung District Court yesterday sentenced to nine years in prison an unlicensed judo coach who caused the death of a seven-year-old student after slamming him onto the ground more than a dozen times. In its decision against the coach, a man surnamed Ho (何), the court cited his lack of remorse for using excessive force against an inadequately trained child and his failure to reconcile with the parents for his role in their son’s death. Speaking on behalf of the boy’s mother, Taichung City Councilor Jacky Chen (陳清龍) said the family would appeal to a higher court. Prosecutors said that Ho on
RSS