Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) in a speech on May 24 said that “Taiwan should definitely invest in nuclear energy.”
A few days earlier, on May 20, a referendum proposal backed by Taiwan’s opposition parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party, on restarting the No. 2 reactor, only decommissioned on May 17, of the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant in Pingtung County, was passed.
What Huang said exactly was, in fact: “Taiwan should definitely invest in nuclear energy. Energy should not be stigmatized. We need all forms of energy, including wind, solar and nuclear.”
That means, renewable energy and nuclear energy are both options for the power-hungry artificial intelligence (AI) sector.
However, the KMT uses Europe and the US as examples to advocate that Taiwan should keep up with the “world trend of reducing carbon, but not nuclear energy.”
Such a comparison ignores the fact that Taiwan is in the Pacific Rim seismic belt, and the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant was built on the Hengchun fault, making the plant significantly riskier than nuclear power plants in Europe and the US.
Japan, which is also in the seismic belt, promulgated new nuclear safety standards after the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in 2011, regulating that any nuclear power plant built on an active fault is not allowed to operate.
On Aug. 28 last year the Japanese Nuclear Regulation Authority ruled that Tsuruga 2, the second reactor of the Tsuruga nuclear power plant, falls short of the new safety standards and cannot resume operations on due to the risks of an active fault below the reactor.
In addition, International Energy Agency data show that the cost of extending the service life of a nuclear power plant is as high as US$500 to US$1,100 per kilowatt-hour, and it continues to rise.
Investment in renewable energy worldwide reached US$728 billion last year, which is about 10 times that of nuclear energy.
Technological advances have reduced the cost of solar photovoltaics by more than 30 percent in the past two years, while nuclear power has gradually lost its economic competitiveness due to high construction costs, long construction periods and high risks.
Huang’s speech highlights the AI industry’s demand for energy. To achieve its goal of utilizing 100 percent renewable energy by this year, it is estimated that Nvidia’s annual green electricity demand in Taiwan would exceed 10 billion kilowatt-hours, close to one-third of Taiwan’s total green electricity generation last year.
Nvidia has established a huge supply chain in Taiwan and therefore has significant bargaining power to negotiate with the government about renewable energy policies other than nuclear power investment.
Google pushed the government to revise the Electricity Act (電業法) in 2017 to allow companies to directly purchase renewable energy, laying an important foundation for the liberalization of the green electricity market.
Since Google can do it, there is no reason why Nvidia — given its global scale and influence — cannot get its supply chain to use 100 percent renewable energy by 2030, creating a win-win situation for Taiwan’s industry and energy transformation.
Lena Chang is a Taipei-based climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace East Asia.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
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