Environmental activists and members of small political parties yesterday urged people to vote “no” in the national referendum on Aug. 23 about restarting the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant.
Taiwan should invest more in geothermal power generation and other sources of sustainable energy to transition into low-carbon and safer electricity generation, Green Party Taiwan convener Kan Chung-wei (甘崇緯) said, and castigated the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) for “raising false hope for reviving nuclear power in Taiwan.”
The Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant was decommissioned on May 17.
Photo: CNA
“Reviving the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant would set the course back to the old, high-risk path and would be very expensive,” Kan said, referencing studies that showed that safety inspections, evaluations, equipment upgrades and the construction of earthquake-resistant engineering to enhance the stability of the plant would cost more than NT$100 billion (US$3.34 billion).
“The Ma-anshan plant has an old type of reactor, which cannot be renewed, and has high risk factors. Taiwan is densely populated, and if an accident occurs at the plant, it would be difficult to evacuate people and prevent the spread of radioactivity,” he said. “The result would be catastrophic.”
Even advanced nations have problems dealing with nuclear waste, Kan said.
It took Finland 40 years to complete an underground storage facility for spent nuclear materials, while Taiwan cannot even select a proper site, he said.
“It is highly irresponsible of the KMT and the TPP to choose to generate more nuclear waste,” Taiwan Obasang Political Equity Party representative Shen Pei-ling (沈佩玲) said. “Those would last many thousands of years, putting our future generations at risk.”
Taiwan Climate Action Network researcher Wei Yang (魏揚) said: “Restarting the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant is the wrong choice. It would set back Taiwan’s renewable energy plan and weaken our international competitiveness in reducing carbon emissions.”
“A huge investment is also needed for new construction and the upgrade of old nuclear power plants, but that time and money would be better spent on the transition to renewable energy,” Wei said.
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