Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is expected to submit a plan to restart two decommissioned nuclear power plants to the Nuclear Safety Commission by March next year, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
The ministry in a statement said that it has approved Taipower’s evaluation report, which found it was feasible to restart the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) and the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant in Pingtung County’s Hengchun Township (恆春).
However, the report concluded that restarting the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Shihmen District (石門) was not feasible, because its two reactors were decommissioned more than eight years ago and its equipment has severely aged, the ministry said.
Photo: Tsai Tsung-hsien, Taipei Times
Following the evaluation, Taipower would draft restart plans for the two nuclear power plants and launch safety inspections, including assessments of how badly the plants’ equipment has aged and their seismic resilience, it said.
Inspections at the Ma-anshan plant would require peer review and assistance from the original manufacturer, a process that is expected to take about one-and-a-half to two years to complete, the ministry added.
The process would take longer at the Guosheng plant, because its used nuclear fuel must be removed from the reactor and stored before safety inspections can be carried out, the ministry said.
The evaluation report was carried out in response to amendments to the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法) passed in May, which provide a legal basis for continuing to operate nuclear power plants even after they have entered the decommissioning stage.
The No. 2 reactor at the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant was shut down on May 17.
Taiwan’s three nuclear power plants, which generated about 15 percent of the nation’s electricity as recently as 2014, have all been decommissioned.
Nuclear power advocates have said the plants should be restarted and that the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮), which was close to completion before being mothballed in 2014, be opened and used to give Taiwan a source of low-emission electricity.
The Energy Administration said that for the first nine months of this year, about 85 percent of Taiwan’s electricity was generated by fossil fuels.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS