The nation will have sufficient electricity throughout this year, Premier William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday, adding that reactivation of the No. 2 reactor of the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) would not interfere with the Democratic Progressive Party’s promise to establish a “nuclear-free homeland.”
Lai made the remarks at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei in response to questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lee Yen-hsiu (李彥秀) on whether the nation is experiencing an electricity shortage.
While acknowledging that state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) has fallen slightly behind on its goal of achieving an energy reserve of 6 percent, he said the company’s power generation would undoubtedly be enough to cover this year’s consumption.
Asked why the Executive Yuan has requested that lawmakers sign a proposal to reactivate Guosheng’s No. 2 reactor, Lai said that as the reactor has just undergone annual maintenance, it is standard procedure for Taipower to tender a proposal to reactivate it.
The proposal should not be interpreted as the government backtracking on its pledge to create a nuclear-free homeland by 2025, he said later, in response to a question by People First Party Legislator Chou Chen Hsiu-hsia (周陳秀霞).
Asked by Lee about media reports that Taipower is poised to hike electricity prices next month, Lai said: “There is no need to speculate on this issue right now, so that misunderstanding can be avoided.”
The Bureau of Energy’s Electricity Pricing Review Committee would assess whether it is necessary to increase electricity prices, he said.
Lee called an amendment to the Air Pollution Act (空氣汙染防制法) proposed by the Cabinet the “sham of the century,” as Article 14 of the bill stipulates that there will be no ceiling to the amount of natural gas that can be used by power plants, which could generate air pollution different from that of coal-fired power plants.
She said Environmental Protection Administration Minister Lee Ying-yuan (李應元) should heed his pledge to resign if he fails to reduce the number of days on which levels of PM2.5 — fine particulate matter measuring 2.5 micrometers or less — trigger a “red alert” on the administration’s color-coded air quality index by 20 percent from the number recorded in 2015.
Despite the premier reiterating that the supply and price of toilet paper was stable, Lee said that Lai and President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) are “failing to win the public’s trust” when it comes to their ability to regulate product prices.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Ho Hsin-chun (何欣純) attributed media reports about electricity and toilet paper price hikes to politically motived people manipulating public sentiment.
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