Activating the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant would be impossible, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers said yesterday, presenting reasons that they believe completing construction of the plant would be more complicated than it appears.
During a visit to the facility in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮) on Monday, a bipartisan group of six lawmakers found that restarting construction would “indeed be a disaster,” DPP caucus whip Liu Shyh-fang (劉世芳) told a news conference at the legislature in Taipei.
The Control Yuan has issued 19 censures and the Atomic Energy Council has issued 45 code violations linked to the site, not to mention the construction troubles, Liu said.
Photo: Huang Pei-chun, Taipei Times
DPP Legislator Fan Yun (范雲) said that the visit firmly convinced her it would be impossible and deeply inadvisable to activate the plant.
A fault directly below the plant’s turbine has been linked to an active, offshore fault, Fan said, citing a Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) employee.
It could withstand peak ground acceleration of up to 0.4g, but in a large tremor — such as the 921 Earthquake that struck on Sept. 21, 1999, in Nantou County which detectors showed had a peak acceleration of 1g — the entire structure would be destroyed, wasting untold time and money, she said.
Conducting another geological survey would take four years, she said.
When the fault under the plant was discovered in 1999, Taipower backfilled the site rather than addressing the issue, DPP caucus secretary-general Tsai Shih-ying (蔡適應) said.
This is not to mention its fundamentally flawed design, which no amount of repairs or reinforcement would help, Tsai said, adding that even Taipower employees agree in private.
“It is like a small house crammed with stuff,” he said. “How could you get in to fix it?”
Plans were still not finished when construction began, so it was revised as work went on, Fan said.
“The plant was flawed from the start and is now falling apart,” she said.
One serious design flaw in the most important reactor makes it difficult to access for repairs, Fan said.
In addition, the No. 1 generator was completed with 1,777 parts taken from the No. 2 generator, but it still failed tests, while the No. 2 generator is incomplete, she said.
Tsai said that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) had an inconsistent position on the matter.
In 2013, then-Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) urged for the issue not to be put to a referendum, while Broadcasting Corp of China chairman Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康) has written that the issue should not be solved through a public vote, Tsai said.
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