Slamming a proposal by former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to revive the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, opponents of nuclear power yesterday urged the government to expedite the nation’s transition to renewable energy.
Ma on Wednesday told the Chinese-language Apple Daily that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) policy of phasing out nuclear power facilities by 2025, which was written into the Electricity Act (電業法) last year, is a hasty decision that is impossible to achieve.
Nuclear power is sufficient, stable, cheap and clean, while renewable energy’s sole merit is clean power, Ma said, adding that the nation’s foreign investment has been declining due to an energy crisis.
The Tsai administration should consider reviving the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant and extend the operations of the nation’s three existing nuclear power plants, he said.
Construction of the fourth power plant was suspended for three years by the Ma administration on July 1, 2015.
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) has decided to transport the plant’s 1,744 fuel rods back to the US supplier within three years to seek foreign buyers starting this month.
The state-run company in 2013 estimated that it would require another NT$47.8 billion (US$1.57 billion at the current exchange rate) to finish the plant’s construction, Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan consultant Tsai Chung-yueh (蔡中岳) said yesterday.
Disposing of the plant’s assets soon is the right decision to prevent further losses, he added.
The nation’s power supply has indeed been tighter over the past two years, but with more new power generators and those under repair becoming operational this month, the operating reserve margin has stayed above 6 percent this month, Green Citizens’ Action Alliance deputy secretary-general Hung Shen-han (洪申翰) said.
The nation does not face a power shortage as some nuclear power proponents have claimed; rather, the operating reserve margin should reach 14.9 percent by 2025 and keep rising, even after all nuclear facilities have been phased out, Hung said, adding the estimates were based on Taipower data.
Ma is misleading the public, especially when he says that foreign investment in Taiwan is declining, publisher and former national policy adviser Rex How (郝明義) said.
Foreign direct investment totaled US$7.5 billion last year, the third highest in 10 years, better than during Ma’s time in office, he said.
The government should be more decisive in promoting energy transformation, instead of resorting to nuclear power, which would produce more nuclear waste that it is unable to handle, he added.
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