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
After more than a year of review, the National Security Bureau on Monday said it has completed a sweeping declassification of political archives from the Martial Law period, transferring the full collection to the National Archives Administration under the National Development Council. The move marks another significant step in Taiwan’s long journey toward transitional justice. The newly opened files span the architecture of authoritarian control: internal security and loyalty investigations, intelligence and counterintelligence operations, exit and entry controls, overseas surveillance of Taiwan independence activists, and case materials related to sedition and rebellion charges. For academics of Taiwan’s White Terror era —
On Feb. 7, the New York Times ran a column by Nicholas Kristof (“What if the valedictorians were America’s cool kids?”) that blindly and lavishly praised education in Taiwan and in Asia more broadly. We are used to this kind of Orientalist admiration for what is, at the end of the day, paradoxically very Anglo-centered. They could have praised Europeans for valuing education, too, but one rarely sees an American praising Europe, right? It immediately made me think of something I have observed. If Taiwanese education looks so wonderful through the eyes of the archetypal expat, gazing from an ivory tower, how
China has apparently emerged as one of the clearest and most predictable beneficiaries of US President Donald Trump’s “America First” and “Make America Great Again” approach. Many countries are scrambling to defend their interests and reputation regarding an increasingly unpredictable and self-seeking US. There is a growing consensus among foreign policy pundits that the world has already entered the beginning of the end of Pax Americana, the US-led international order. Consequently, a number of countries are reversing their foreign policy preferences. The result has been an accelerating turn toward China as an alternative economic partner, with Beijing hosting Western leaders, albeit
After 37 US lawmakers wrote to express concern over legislators’ stalling of critical budgets, Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) pledged to make the Executive Yuan’s proposed NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.7 billion) special defense budget a top priority for legislative review. On Tuesday, it was finally listed on the legislator’s plenary agenda for Friday next week. The special defense budget was proposed by President William Lai’s (賴清德) administration in November last year to enhance the nation’s defense capabilities against external threats from China. However, the legislature, dominated by the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), repeatedly blocked its review. The
RSS