Next year’s No Nukes Asia Forum is to be hosted in Taiwan for the sixth time, the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union said yesterday, calling on people to reject a referendum seeking to maintain the use of nuclear power.
Established in Japan in 1993, the forum has been held almost every year in different Asian nations and was hosted in Taiwan in 1995, 2002, 2005, 2010 and 2014, the union said in a statement.
With the theme “Strengthening People-to-People Solidarity: Towards a Nuclear-Free Future,” the forum was held in Manila and Bataan, the Philippines, last week and was attended by participants from across Asia, including union director Liu Jyh-jian (劉志堅) and member Gwo Jin-chywan (郭金泉).
Proponents and opponents of nuclear power still wrestle each other in many nations, especially China, Russia, France, Japan and South Korea, which have continued to develop nuclear power or export related techniques to other countries, Liu said.
Taiwan has taken the lead in proposing the phasing out of nuclear power in Asia by including last year a “nuclear power-free homeland by 2025” goal into the Electricity Act (電業法), but the nation’s anti-nuclear movement has not yet succeeded, as nuclear power supporters are attempting to scrap the policy through a referendum, he said, urging people to vote it down.
The referendum, which is to be held alongside the nine-in-one local elections on Saturday, was initiated by Nuclear Myth Busters founder Huang Shih-hsiu (黃士修) and has garnered the support of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
Both sides have launched increasingly intense campaigns ahead of the elections.
To debunk an “irrational nuclear scare,” the referendum’s proponents on Monday hosted a forum in Taipei, at which US-based group Environmental Progress founder Michael Shellenberger and Imperial College London molecular pathology professor Gerry Thomas were invited to speak with former Atomic Energy Council minister Tsai Chuen-horng (蔡春鴻).
The National Anti-nuclear Action Platform that day issued a statement by former US Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Gregory Jaczko saying that “nuclear power is an unreliable and expensive technology” and “energy from wind, solar and water is becoming the cheapest sustainable, clean energy source.”
Greenpeace Taiwan yesterday released an open letter by Stanford University civil and environmental engineering professor Mark Jacobson saying that Taiwan could “supply 100 percent of its electricity and energy needs with renewable energy by 2050” if “corresponding power generation and energy storage systems are actively developed.”
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