As the world continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, extreme weather events — evidence of the rapid progression of climate change — are wreaking havoc across the globe.
Flooding has hit the UK, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Turkey, China, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the US and New Zealand this year, while wildfires have devastated parts of California, Australia, Turkey and Greece.
Now, energy shortages, born partly from soaring demand as economies emerge from COVID-19 lockdowns and partly from commitments to ambitious net-zero carbon emissions policies, are giving governments, businesses and people around the world more headaches.
China’s current energy woes originate from a combination of increased factory orders, its ban on highly energy-efficient Newcastle grade coal from Australia and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) policy of decarbonizing the economy.
Heavy reliance on renewable energy in Europe and the US has made the electricity supply vulnerable to high gas prices, and a surge in the price has also forced governments to rely more on “dirty” sources, such as coal, to make up the shortfall.
The argument for nuclear, as a carbon-neutral complementary part of a nation’s energy mix, is beginning to look more attractive, especially when new technologies promise to mitigate the major problem of long-term storage of toxic spent nuclear fuel rods.
The government’s policy of a “nuclear-free homeland” by 2025 makes sense in a nation that has frequent earthquakes and aging nuclear reactors that have been or are due to be decommissioned.
At present, 12.7 percent of Taiwan’s energy comes from nuclear power, with 40.8 percent from gas, 36.4 percent from coal and 5.8 percent from renewables. The government wants to change this mix post-2025 to 50 percent from natural gas, 30 percent from coal and 20 percent from renewables.
The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan turned public opinion firmly against nuclear power, but that disaster was a decade ago and people have short memories.
One of the referendums that passed in November 2018 asked whether the government should abolish the clause requiring that nuclear power plants stop operations by 2025, showing that public opinion was already coming around to the idea of maintaining nuclear power as a component of the energy mix.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in April announced that Taiwan should strive for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, making the transition away from nuclear power even more challenging.
The issue of the stability of the energy supply was thrust front and center of national debate after two nationwide power outages in the same week in May.
On Dec. 18 there is to be another referendum, initiated by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), calling on the government to restart construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮).
The Democratic Progressive Party has accused the KMT of initiating the referendum purely for political purposes, but the KMT has consistently voiced its preference for inclusion of nuclear power in the nation’s energy mix.
Taiwan’s geology makes it foolhardy to continue operating nuclear power plants and improvements in reactor technology should not make people disregard these inherent dangers, neither should the fact that the Tohoku disaster was a decade ago.
The government should remain steadfast on transitioning away from nuclear power. Recent events — domestic and international — and new commitments will make the argument more difficult to defend, but it is an argument the government must win before Dec. 18.
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