New Power Party Executive Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) yesterday said that radioactive metal from an abandoned titanium dioxide plant in New Taipei City was illegally sold to scrapyards in central and southern Taiwan, but the Atomic Energy Council has insisted that it was not radioactive.
Police have found that since Dec. 19, at least four batches of scrap metal were illegally transported from the plant, but so far they have only tracked down one shipment, Huang said on Facebook.
The batch that police located was transported to Taichung’s Liougu (六股) before being sold to scrapyards in New Taipei City’s Taishan District (泰山) and Taoyuan’s Guanyin District (觀音), he said.
Photo: Lin Hsin-han, Taipei Times
The plant, which ceased operations in 1999 and has remained inactive, produced titanium dioxide using radioactive ilmenite.
Huang said that when inspecting the plant earlier yesterday, he learned from Liu Wen-chung (劉文忠), head of the council’s Fuel Cycle and Materials Administration, that Changhua County-based E-Top Metal Co in July 2017 reported finding radioactive scrap metal, but that the council did not test the metal for radiation until Monday.
“For one-and-a-half years, the company did not send the metal to the council’s Institute of Nuclear Energy Research and the council did nothing to track down where it came from,” Huang said.
He said that the council was “irresponsible,” and urged the Executive Yuan to launch an investigation into the matter and discipline the officials involved.
“The council has been unbelievably corrupt. What it did was completely unacceptable,” Huang said.
The missing radioactive scrap metal must be tracked down to protect public health and safety, he added.
On Monday last week, New Taipei City police notified the council that some of the scrap metal at the abandoned plant had been stolen, the council said in a statement.
After inspecting the plant, the council said that it found that some scrap metal had indeed been taken, but that it was not radioactive.
The council said that it reviewed the scrapyards’ recycling records and found that three batches of scrap metal totaling 7.1 tonnes had been sold by the plant from Dec. 21 to Jan. 9, but tests found no radioactivity.
Tests also determined that scrap metal sold by the plant that was previously suspected of being radioactive had actually come from somewhere else, it added.
The council said that it has asked E-Top Metal to follow procedures for handling radioactive metal, but added that it does not have the authority to intervene if the company does not comply by a certain date.
Tests showed that the metal was also not from the abandoned plant, it said, urging the owner of the plant to manage any remaining radioactive metals and waste.
Local police should increase patrols of the abandoned facility and install security cameras on the site, the council said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,