Nuclear power advocate Huang Shih-hsiu (黃士修), who initiated next month’s referendum question about restarting the mothballed Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮), is behaving like a hoodlum.
During a televised debate with Taiwan Power Co’s Nuclear Power Division head Hsu Yung-hui (許永輝), who opposes the initiative, Huang said: “You should watch your mouth.”
“Are your affairs in order?” Hsu later asked.
Huang’s apparent threat to Hsu and his family has rightly caused a stink, but Hsu’s reply deserves equal attention.
“You have never so much as turned a wrench inside any of Taiwan’s nuclear power plants, nor have you escorted colleagues through them,” Hsu said.
“Don’t tell me how much you love the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant,” Hsu added. “If you are saying that you want me to expose my family and other Taiwanese families to the risk of radiological contamination, I’m telling you I won’t do it!”
Hsu’s reply should be reflected upon by pan-blue camp politicians who embrace nuclear power without being able to guarantee its safety, as well as selfish “not in my backyard” individuals who support nuclear power so long as the waste is not stored in their communities.
As Huang tried to demonstrate that spent nuclear fuel is “not harmful,” he rather bizarrely compared the spent fuel stored on Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) to the fictional Japanese Gundam battle robots called “mobile suits.”
Huang has criticized the residents of Orchid Island for “irrationally” claiming that their health has been harmed by radioactive material stored on the island.
Huang has said that the island’s residents only oppose the storage facility because they are “angling for compensation.” Huang’s level of ignorance is truly astonishing.
The thorniest aspect of spent nuclear fuel is radiation dosage and radiation half-life. High-level radioactive waste — spent nuclear fuel — has a half-life of more than 100,000 years and the radiation dose is more than 10 million times the normal natural background value. This requires long-term, tightly controlled isolation to prevent the radiation from causing harm to organisms.
Concern over the way nuclear waste is handled is shared in societies the world over. Many people are deeply fearful that serious harm could be caused were an accident to occur. Despite this, Huang compared nuclear waste to a Gundam “mobile suit.” His extreme ignorance and loutish behavior deserves condemnation by all intellectually honest members of the public.
Regarding Orchid Island, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government in 1975 did not inform residents that the Longmen area had been selected as a nuclear waste storage site, falsely saying that it was constructing a pineapple factory to promote the local economy. Aboriginal elders signed the agreement for the “factory” because they could not read Chinese characters.
In 1982, the facility began to receive and store low-level nuclear waste. After the facility was exposed and a scandal erupted, the Tao community asked for the waste to be removed. In 1988, they launched a campaign to “drive away evil spirits.”
Huang characterized the nuclear waste as a form of “social welfare” given to the islanders by the government, the inference being that the islanders are only after money. The man’s disingenuousness knows no bounds.
Chin Ching is an educator.
Translated by Edward Jones
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
On March 22, 2023, at the close of their meeting in Moscow, media microphones were allowed to record Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) telling Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, “Right now there are changes — the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years — and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Widely read as Xi’s oath to create a China-Russia-dominated world order, it can be considered a high point for the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea (CRINK) informal alliance, which also included the dictatorships of Venezuela and Cuba. China enables and assists Russia’s war against Ukraine and North Korea’s
An article published in the Dec. 12, 1949, edition of the Central Daily News (中央日報) bore a headline with the intimidating phrase: “You Cannot Escape.” The article was about the execution of seven “communist spies,” some say on the basis of forced confessions, at the end of the 713 Penghu Incident. Those were different times, born of political paranoia shortly after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) relocated to Taiwan following defeat in China by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The phrase was a warning by the KMT regime to the local populace not to challenge its power or threaten national unity. The
The Iran war has exposed a fundamental vulnerability in the global energy system. The escalating confrontation between Iran, Israel and the US has begun to shake international energy markets, largely because Iran is disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. This narrow waterway carries roughly one-third of the world’s seaborne oil, making it one of the most strategically sensitive energy corridors in the world. Even the possibility of disruption has triggered sharp volatility in global oil prices. The duration and scope of the conflict remain uncertain, with senior US officials offering contradictory signals about how long military operations might continue.
RSS