Changes to the Referendum Act (公民投票法) mean that from Aug. 28 a national referendum can be held once every two years. Referendum proposals that have passed the second signature threshold include restarting construction of the mothballed Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮); banning the importation of pork containing ractopamine; binding referendums to presidential and legislative elections; and providing enhanced protections to algal reefs off the coast of Taoyuan.
Central Election Commission (CEC) Chairman Lee Chin-yung (李進勇) has said that every additional referendum adds approximately NT$180 million (US$6.37 million) to the budget — a not insignificant sum.
There are two reasons the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant referendum should not be held:
First, the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant is near the capital: This is extremely rare and raises serious questions about safety.
On March 11, 2011, an earthquake off the east coast of Japan triggered a massive tsunami that overwhelmed the sea defenses of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. Radiation leaks from the plant’s reactors forced the evacuation of 154,000 people from the immediate and surrounding areas.
Following the disaster, Tokyo-based Taiwanese writer Liu Li-erh (劉黎兒) wrote an article that was published in the Taiwanese media, relating concerns about the safety of Taiwan’s civil nuclear power industry by Japanese writer Takashi Hirose and a number of Japanese specialists.
The safety concerns were related to Taiwan’s Jinshan and Guosheng nuclear power plants in New Taipei City being within a 30km radius of urban population centers that are home to 6 million residents.
In contrast, there were only 170,000 people living within a 30km radius of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.
Second, the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant has taken longer to build than any other nuclear power station in the world, spanning three decades of stop-start construction.
The budget for the plant was originally set at NT$169.7 billion, but this later jumped to NT$283.9 billion.
The project has also suffered the most delays of any infrastructure project in Taiwan’s history and is also the most costly nuclear power plant project in the world.
The main reason for this was the ill-conceived splitting up of the project and division among sub-contractors, which resulted in an unmanageable 1,000 tender processes.
Design changes, construction errors, corruption and embezzlement, the repeated halting and restarting of construction, and delays have drained the public’s confidence in the plant. The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster further compounded the public’s fears over safety.
The initiators of the referendum for starting the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant claim that nuclear power is needed to provide the nation with an abundant source of “clean energy.”
However, the wording of the proposed referendum fails to mention two major risks inherent in starting the plant. Despite this glaring omission, the CEC has approved the referendum.
Furthermore, by ignoring the safety of residents in Taipei and New Taipei City, the mainly Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) politicians who are vigorously supporting the referendum not only show that they have clearly not done their homework, they also appear to be perfectly willing to use it as a cynical ploy to attract votes.
Jang Show-ling is chairperson of the Public Economics Research Center at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Edward Jones
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