Taiwan Power Co’s (Taipower) proposal to build a coal-fired power plant in Changhua County yesterday was rejected for the second time in the project’s 12-year history, while the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) suspended discussion of the company’s decommissioning plan for the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City as it was deemed to be “ill-defined.”
Taipower’s plan to build a two-generator plant in the Changhua Coastal Industrial Park was first submitted for review in 2004. Between 2004 and 2007, the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) committee concluded that the project should be rejected.
However, before the EPA could formally adopt the committee’s decision, Taipower withdrew its submission to prevent a wholesale rejection.
The company resubmitted the project in 2008, almost unchanged from its original submission, and in January, the EIA committee rejected the project, as the project does not conform to environment and national energy development plans.
At yesterday’s grand assembly, dozens of protesters criticized the Changhua project, saying the county is surrounded by the Taichung Power Plant and Formosa Plastics Group’s naphtha cracker factory in Yunlin, adding that the proposed plant would only worsen pollution.
After an hour of closed-door deliberations, the assembly rejected the proposal and asked the Ministry of Economic Affairs to reject the company’s development application.
The assembly was also set to review Taipower’s request to have plans to decommission the Jinshan plant go directly to second-phase EIA reviews, but the assembly suspended the review as the plan was unclear.
The 25-year decommissioning plan includes eight years of facility decontamination, 12 years of plant demolition, three years of monitoring and two years of site restoration.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
A bipartisan group of US senators has introduced a bill to enhance cooperation with Taiwan on drone development and to reduce reliance on supply chains linked to China. The proposed Blue Skies for Taiwan Act of 2026 was introduced by Republican US senators Ted Cruz and John Curtis, and Democratic US senators Jeff Merkley and Andy Kim. The legislation seeks to ease constraints on Taiwan-US cooperation in uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), including dependence on China-sourced components, limited access to capital and regulatory barriers under US export controls, a news release issued by Cruz on Wednesday said. The bill would establish a "Blue UAS
RSS