Storing nuclear waste on Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) is wrong, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said yesterday, describing it as a form of “bullying Aborigines.”
Ko made the remarks at a meeting attended by the deputy mayors of New Taipei City, Taoyuan and Keelung to discuss disaster procedures, including hospitalization and evacuations.
When asked by reporters if he agrees with Taiwan Power Co’s (Taipower) recent proposal to transfer nuclear waste on Lanyu back to New Taipei City, where the Jinshan and Guosheng power plants are located, Ko said that fuel storage pools at the two power plants are also nearing capacity, posing a risk to national security.
This problem should be addressed in tandem with nuclear waste stored on Lanyu, he said.
The mayor said that he does not oppose nuclear power, but he is against Taiwan developing and using it, as the nation is vulnerable to earthquakes and has limited space for nuclear power plants to operate safely.
“Wrong decisionmaking is a more serious problem than corruption, the perfect example being the decision to build nuclear power plants in the nation,” he said
He cast doubt on the premise adopted by the Atomic Energy Council when it designated “emergency response areas” within 8km of a nuclear power plant.
“Why is it 8km and not 30km?” Ko asked. “But then again, it would be impossible to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people living within 30km of a nuclear power plant.”
One conceivable outcome that will accompany efforts to phase out nuclear energy is that electricity prices will surely rise, Ko said, adding that Taiwanese should prepare themselves for this.
Citing Taipei as an example, where he said renewable energy sources provide only about 3 percent of the electricity consumed in the city, Ko said that the nation should develop more alternative energy sources, such as generating energy from waste and stepping up efforts to utilize biogas.
Ko said that the meeting only touched on evacuation during a nuclear meltdown, but that providing medical treatment to residents affected by radiation would be an even more daunting task.
Referencing his experience as the director of the National Taiwan University Hospital’s Department of Emergency Medicine, Ko said that a brochure printed by the hospital at the time said that patients suffering from radioactive contamination must not be allowed to enter its premises and that they should be rinsed outdoors and sent back to where they were picked up in the same vehicle.
The nation has yet to come up with a way to treat such patients, he 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:
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