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.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
The next minimum wage hike is expected to exceed NT$30,000, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday during an award ceremony honoring “model workers,” including migrant workers, at the Presidential Office ahead of Workers’ Day today. Lai said he wished to thank the awardees on behalf of the nation and extend his most sincere respect for their hard work, on which Taiwan’s prosperity has been built. Lai specifically thanked 10 migrant workers selected for the award, saying that although they left their home countries to further their own goals, their efforts have benefited Taiwan as well. The nation’s industrial sector and small businesses lay
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