The fuel rods at the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮) will take about two to three years to remove and would be done in stages, Minister of Economic Affairs Lee Chih-kung (李世光) told lawmakers yesterday.
During a question-and-answer session at a legislative committee meeting, Lee said the unused fuel rods could be refurbished and sold, but permission would first need to be obtained from the original exporter, the US.
Lee said the removal of the plant’s 1,744 fuel rods is expected to begin later this year.
Work on the plant was halted in 2014 and the facility was mothballed following nationwide protests against nuclear power, including a hunger strike by former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairman Lin I-hsiung (林義雄), a longtime anti-nuclear campaigner.
Responding to criticism that the ministry was too lenient on Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) after it failed to honor its promise to remove nuclear waste from Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) last year, Lee said the government is fully committed to carrying out the removal, but that the process is ongoing.
A nuclear waste storage facility was built on the island in 1982, but the island’s residents, most of whom are Tao Aborigines, have been demanding for years that Taipower remove the waste.
The DPP has long advocated that operations at the nation’s three operating nuclear power plants should not be extended and that construction of the fourth plant should be terminated to make the nation nuclear-free by 2025.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching