Taiwan plans to maintain its energy policy of operating nuclear power reactors until the end of their desinged lifespan, and by using other energy sources to fill gaps in the energy supply, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
“Taiwan will stick to its nuclear power plant timeline. Despite differing opinions, we do not plan to shut down those reactors before of the end of their designed life cycles,” Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua (王美花) told reporters in Taipei.
The state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) has drafted several measures to secure a stable power supply, including electricity allocation plans to manage water shortages caused by climate change and surging energy costs resulting from the war in Ukraine, Wang said.
Photo: Ching Lin, Taipei Times
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Wednesday said that its government is considering using nuclear reactors beyond their designed lifespans along with restarting idled nuclear power reactors to manage a power crisis.
“My understanding is that Japan plans to make some arrangements about the idled reactors that were shut down following the Fukushima disaster in March 2011,” Wang said.
The government has decided to shift from nuclear power and move toward green power to cut carbon emissions.
The No. 2 reactor at Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant is set to stop operation in March next year, while the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors of the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant are to close in 2024 and 2025 respectively, when they are due to reach the end of their operational lives of about 40 years.
Regulations stiputate that any adjustment to nuclear power operations be applied five years in advance, Taipower spokesman Wu Chin-chung (吳進忠) told the Taipei Times.
“The timing has passed,” he said.
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
DIVERSIFICATION: The chip designer expects new non-smartphone products to be available next year or in 2025 as it seeks new growth engines to broaden its portfolio MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it expects non-mobile phone chips, such as automotive chips, to drive its growth beyond 2025, as it pursues diversification to create a more balanced portfolio. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said it has counted on smartphone chips, power management chips and chips for other applications to fuel its growth in the past few years, but it is developing new products to continue growing. “Our future growth drivers, of course, will be outside of smartphones,” MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu City. “As new products would be available next year
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness