The construction of Taiwan’s Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in Gongliao District (貢寮), New Taipei City (新北市), does not need to be halted even though the project has several problems, Atomic Energy Council Minister Tsai Chuen-horng (蔡春鴻) said yesterday.
Tsai also pledged that once the country reinforces safety measures at the plant, disasters such as the nuclear meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi reactor following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami would not occur.
“The Fourth Nuclear Power Plant project has encountered several difficulties, but they are not serious enough to require an immediate halt to construction,” Tsai said at a conference on energy and industrial development in Taipei.
While Taiwan does not have the capacity to design a nuclear power plant, the country ranks among the best in the world in terms of its ability to run and maintain such facilities, Tsai said.
The severity of the Japanese nuclear catastrophe resulted from the fact that the plant’s design had not anticipated the severity of the disaster coupled with the delayed response following the accident, the minister said.
Taiwan, on the other hand, has taken precautions against such nuclear accidents since the major incident in Japan, he said.
Not only has Taiwan moved to improve safety measures that were already in place, but it has beefed up its capability to respond to serious accidents, Tsai said.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
Taiwan-Japan Travel Passes are available for use on public transit networks in the two countries, Taoyuan Metro Corp said yesterday, adding that discounts of up to 7 percent are available. Taoyuan Metro, the Taipei MRT and Japan’s Keisei Electric Railway teamed up to develop the pass. Taoyuan Metro operates the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport MRT Line, while Keisei Electric Railway offers express services between Tokyo’s Narita Airport, and the Keisei Ueno and Nippori stations in the Japanese capital, as well as between Narita and Haneda airports. The basic package comprises one one-way ticket on the Taoyuan MRT Line and one Skyliner ticket on
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
A pro-Russia hacker group has launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the Taiwanese government in retaliation for President William Lai’s (賴清德) comments suggesting that China should have a territorial dispute with Russia, an information security company said today. The hacker group, NoName057, recently launched an HTTPs flood attack called “DDoSia” targeting Taiwanese government and financial units, Radware told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). Local tax bureaus in New Taipei City, Keelung, Hsinchu and Taoyuan were mentioned by the hackers. Only the Hsinchu Local Tax Bureau site appeared to be down earlier in the day, but was back
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