The Executive Yuan yesterday denied a media report claiming that Premier Lin Chuan (林全) plans to restart two shuttered nuclear reactors to avoid potential power shortages, saying that a reactivation is unlikely unless in extreme cases.
According to a report by the Chinese-language Mirror Media, Lin said the Cabinet might order the reactivation of a reactor at the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Shihmen District (石門) and another at the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in the city’s Wanli District (萬里) should the nation face severe power shortages.
The two reactors have been shut down for maintenance since December 2014 and April respectively. Although repairs have been completed, the legislature has suspended plans to restart the reactors due to safety concerns and public calls to decommission the aging reactors.
Denying the media report, Executive Yuan spokesman Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇) said that the headline — “Reactors to be restarted during power shortages: Lin Chuan” — seriously misrepresented Lin’s comments and quoted him out of context, in which reactivation would be a contingency measure that is unlikely to be adopted.
The report failed to represent the strict preconditions for restarting the reactors, resulting in a story that was dramatically different from the actual interview, he said.
To recapitulate the interview, Hsu quoted Lin as saying that a reactivation would not be ordered unless the nation faced serious electricity outages in the event major power plants went offline due to mechanical failures.
Moreover, the reactivation has to be assessed by the Atomic Energy Council (AEC) and approved by the Legislative Yuan, Hsu said.
“Even though the AEC considers the nuclear plants to be safe, we will not reactivate the reactors, because there is sufficient power supply, and we will exhaust all possible means to prevent an electricity shortage,” Hsu quoted Lin as saying.
There should be no power shortages in the long term, considering the development of solar, wind, geothermal and tidal energy, Lin said, reaffirming the government’s goal to make the nation nuclear-free without experiencing power shortages.
“We cannot make the nation face power shortages when working toward a nuclear-free nation, because a government causing power shortage is an irresponsible one,” Hsu quoted Lin as saying.
Comparing a reactor restart to the use of a cardiopulmonary resuscitation device in patients with cardiac and respiratory failure, Hsu said that reactivation could only be authorized in emergency situations, but it is an unlikely option in daily scenarios.
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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