On Tuesday last week, former Democratic Progressive Party chairman Lin I-hsiung (林義雄) commenced a hunger strike at Taipei’s Gikong Presbyterian Church to demand that the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮) be terminated.
The following day, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) visited the church, where he asked a minister to give Lin a card bearing a message.
In his message, Ma gave Lin his assurances that “after experts from Taiwan and overseas have completed stringent safety checks on the plant, its completion will be put to a referendum, so the whole country can decide its future.”
Yet of what consequence is it if the Gongliao plant satisfies these experts’ stringent safety checks? What do the nuclear power facilities of Three Mile Island in the US, Chernobyl in the former USSR and Fukushima Dai-ichi in Japan have in common? All three passed rigorous safety checks conducted by experts.
Whether because of a natural disaster or human error, there was a meltdown at each of these plants and radiation was leaked into the surrounding environment. After their respective accidents, the three nuclear plants were abandoned and settlements and cities in the radiation disaster zones became ghost towns. Why did the so-called experts that inspected these facilities not see the future disasters coming, thereby failing to ensure measures were in place to prevent them?
These incidents are not restricted to nuclear power stations: The planes that flew American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 both passed strict safety testing, and hijackers were still able to turn them into manned missiles and crash them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.
The “unsinkable” Titanic went down on its maiden voyage, as did the mighty World War II battleship Bismarck, one of the largest ever built by Germany. The Japanese battleship Yamato was similarly regarded as invincible, but was ultimately unable to escape its fate at the bottom of the ocean.
Likewise, the Concorde supersonic airliner was once hailed as one of the safest passenger plane’s ever, until one of them crashed. Clearly, just like the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, the confidence and assurances of experts sometimes fail, whether through unforeseen mishaps or wayward human agency.
The capsizing of Italian cruise ship the Costa Concordia last year and the sinking of South Korean ferry the Sewol are more telling cases, since the vessels seemingly sank due to the negligence of their respective captains.
In both cases, the captains abandoned ship when disaster struck, taking to the lifeboats and leaving their passengers behind. It makes one wonder about human nature, and how people will often try to save their own skin when a disaster occurs, rather than carrying out their responsibilities.
The government can order as many safety checks on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant as it wants, but it is questionable that these inspections will include preventative checks against the destructive force of nature, unavoidable disasters or human error.
Should a catastrophe occur at the Gongliao plant after it has gone into operation, who will bear the blame and in what way will they shoulder the responsibility? If these questions cannot be answered satisfactorily, the only possible future for the plant is to leave it unfinished.
Chang Kuo-tsai is a former associate professor at National Hsinchu University of Education and a former deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Association of University Professors.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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