The shipment of the last batch of 120 unused fuel rods from the mothballed Fourth Nuclear Power Plant to the US early on Sunday morning has no bearing on the plant’s future, Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) said yesterday.
The certification on the fuel rods had expired, necessitating their return to Global Nuclear Fuel Americas LLC regardless of whether a referendum to start the power plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮) passes in August, Taipower manager Chang Ting-shu (張廷抒) said by telephone.
“The removal of the fuel rods is a totally separate question from the referendum; the fuel rods could not have been used as is,” Chang said.
Photo courtesy of Taiwan Power Co
Nuclear power advocate Huang Shih-hsiu (黃士修) condemned removing the fuel rods ahead of the referendum.
“The government is running roughshod over the will of the people by accelerating the return of the fuel rods,” Huang told the Chinese-language China Times. “They’re robbing the people of their ability to have a choice.”
However, opponents of nuclear power cheered the removal of the last batch of rods as “dooming” the prospect of starting the power plant.
Chang refused to comment on what it would take to start the power plant, but said that the removal of the fuel rods would not be a critical issue.
“There will be more hearings ahead of August’s referendum to explore this complex topic, but if we do decide to restart the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, we would simply have more fuel rods shipped,” he said.
Construction of the plant began in 1999, but the project was plagued by controversies and delays. It was mothballed numerous times, most recently in 2015 after the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster in 2011 turned many people against nuclear power.
Nuclear Science and Technology Association (NuSTA) chairman Chen Pu-tsan (陳布燦) said that the inspection of unused fuel rods is a safety issue.
“If I recall correctly, they have been sitting in storage for 13 years,” said Chen, who was a Taipower vice president in charge of nuclear power until his retirement. “They needed to go back to the manufacturers to be inspected for damage and recertified.”
Taiwan also needs to address its spent fuel rod issue, as the wet storage pools at the Jinshan and Guosheng nuclear power plants are full or almost full, he said.
Even though the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Shihmen District (石門) was decommissioned in 2019, spent fuel rods remain in the reactor due to a lack of storage space.
“A good solution would be to send the spent fuel to be reprocessed in France, as that would make the remaining waste much easier to deal with,” Chen said.
During reprocessing, unused plutonium and uranium are stripped from the spent fuel, leaving radioactive waste that cannot be utilized for nuclear weapons, he said, adding that the remaining waste is less than 10 percent the volume of the original spent fuel.
“The remaining amount of radioactive waste can then be stored on site more safely at the nuclear power plants until a final location is found,” he said.
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