Chung-Hwa Nuclear Society academics on Friday said that authorities should not rule out the use of nuclear energy, citing slow development of “renewable” energy solutions, despite Premier Lin Chuan (林全) saying that a restart of reactors was “impossible.”
Government offices were under Executive Yuan orders to turn off air-conditioners between 1pm and 3pm for two weeks after damage to a Ho-Ping Power Co transmission tower in Yilan County affected the nation’s power supply.
The measure was lifted early amid a public outcry.
Photo: Tan Wei-sheng, Taipei Times
Asking civil servants to turn off air-conditioners was not an effective solution to the power shortage, the academic group said yesterday.
The Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant’s No. 1 generator in New Taipei City’s Shihmen District (石門) and the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant’s No. 2 generator in the city’s Wanli District (萬里) should be restarted to bolster the nation’s power supply by 6 percent, academics said.
“[The government] should face the difficulties of developing renewable energy practically, rather than setting extremely high energy policy standards wihtout a backup plan,” National Tsing Hua University professor Yeh Tsung-kuang (葉宗洸) said.
Last year, coal-fired power accounted for 39.5 percent of the nation’s electricity supply, followed by gas-fired power at 36 percent and nuclear power at 13.5 percent, the group’s data showed.
Under the nuclear-free homeland by 2025 policy, President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration hopes to increase the percentage of renewable energy from 5.1 percent to 20 percent of the nation’s power supply, increase gas-fired power to 50 percent and reduce coal-fired power to 30 percent.
However, development of renewables is slow and involves too much uncertainty, particularly regarding wind and solar power, the group said.
Wind power developers are having difficulty obtaining land, so the Bureau of Energy has reduced the planned capacity for land-based wind power by 2020 from 1,200 megawatts (MW) to 800MW, the group said.
The planned capacity for offshore wind power by 2020 is set at 520MW, but this is contingent on whether the number of offshore wind turbines can be increased to 130 by then, the group said, adding that Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) has not yet decided where offshore wind turbines will be or the capacity of electricity converting stations.
According to the bureau, solar power installations on land should reach a capacity of 17GW by 2025 and require 25,500 hectares of land, the group said, adding that the land issue has led the bureau to cut the planned capacity for all solar power installations by 2020 from 8.77GW to 6.5GW.
The nation’s hydraulic and biomass power generation are nearly saturated, with their capacities difficult to increase, while Taipower can only become increasingly dependent on coal-fired power, the group said.
However, the utility’s coal fired generators are timeworn; it will have to build another 10 coal-fired power plants and 24 generators in eight years, or it will fail to supply a capacity of 21.47GW.
To increase gas-fired power, another four large gas tanks would have to be built.
However, due to environmentalists’ protests over algae reef protection in Taoyuan, the construction of tanks is undetermined now, the group said.
The nation’s power reserve used to be set at 15 percent, but this year it has been lower than 10 percent, even declining to a new low of 1.72 percent this week, the group 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:
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
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
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