The Executive Yuan yesterday drafted a law to establish an independent agency specializing in radioactive waste management, while it approved a NT$26.1 billion (US$819 million) budget to improve the earthquake resistance of school buildings nationwide.
An independent executive agency is to be established as part of the Ministry of Economic Affairs to take over radioactive waste management from state-run Taiwan Power Co, Executive Yuan spokesman Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇) said.
The agency is to be responsible for finding a site, constructing and managing a nuclear waste repository, the decommissioning of existing storage facilities and if necessary, the shipping of spent nuclear fuel to other countries for reprocessing, Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs Yang Wei-fu (楊偉甫) said.
The agency is part of the government’s aim to decommission all nuclear plants by 2025, and to relocate radioactive waste from the nation’s three active nuclear plants and a storage facility on Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) to a final repository.
Taipower has been accused of not being transparent when selecting sites for a permanent repository, and the agency is to ensure transparency in that process, Yang said.
More than one-third of the agency’s board of directors should be from non-governmental bodies, such as nuclear oversight groups and communities close to the final repository site, to improve transparency and public participation, Yang said, adding that the ministry would not interfere with the selection of agency directors.
The ministry would only be responsible for a back-end management fund, which is to be used to decommission nuclear plants and manage radioactive waste.
The fund, which comes from Taipower and the government, is underfunded, and the ministry is mulling plans to ensure that there is adequate funding for the decommissioning, Yang said.
However, to ensure the independence of such an agency, campaigners against nuclear power have asked that it be directly answerable to the Executive Yuan instead of the ministry, because the ministry has been criticized for having a close connection with Taipower.
Hsu said that an independent executive agency is a semi-governmental body answerable to the Legislative Yuan, so it would not matter which ministry it is subject to.
Meanwhile, the Executive Yuan allocated a three-year, NT$2.61 billion budget to reconstruct and reinforce school buildings.
“Following a magnitude 6.4 earthquake on Feb. 6 in southern Taiwan, the Ministry of Education shortened a planned six-year project to reconstruct school buildings nationwide to a three-year plan,” Minister of Education Pan Wen-chung (潘文忠) said.
“The earthquake destroyed parts of Gueiren Senior High School in Tainan’s Gueiren District (歸仁), but reinforced structures at the school were left intact, so the ministry launched a nationwide reconstruction and reinforcement project,” Pan said.
The project is to reconstruct 246 school buildings and the reinforcement of 1,702 by 2019.
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