Wed, Aug 20, 2025 page3

• Academics urge ‘no’ vote in Saturday’s referendum

  • By Huang Yi-ching and Jake Chung / Staff reporter, with staff writer
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  More than 523 academics have signed a statement urging the public to vote “no” in Saturday’s referendum to restart the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant.

  A tectonic fault line in Pingtung County’s Hengchun Township is 900m from the reactors at the facility and a protrusion from an earthquake could spell disaster, Chen Wen-shan (陳文山), a professor in National Taiwan University’s Department of Geology, told a news conference in Taipei yesterday, citing 2015 and 2022 reports by Taiwan Power Co.

  The geological layer on which the power plant rests is relatively young and a large earthquake might occur there, Chen said.

  

  Academics calling for a “no” vote in Saturday’s referendum on restarting the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant hold placards at a news conference in Taipei yesterday.

  Photo: Hunag Yi-ching, Taipei Times

  Storing spent fuel rods underground was possible in theory, but no site survey has been conducted, he said, adding that with daily compression of the Earth’s crust in Taiwan, fuel rods might become stuck and irretrievable.

  Tsuang Ben-jei (莊秉潔), professor of environmental engineering at National Chung Hsing University, said that if something similar to what befell the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in Japan in 2011 happened at the Ma-anshan site, Taitung County, Kaohsiung, Pingtung County and Hengchun Township (恆春) would have a 5 percent, 5 percent, 10 percent and 70 percent chance respectively of becoming permanent exclusion zones.

  Moreover, the Kuroshio current flows off Hengchun, so fisheries near Taiwan would be affected, Tsuang said.

  Tai Hsing-sheng (戴興盛), a professor of natural resources and environmental studies at National Dong Hwa University, said that nuclear power does not meet the EU’s standards for financial sustainability.

  A levelized cost of electricity assessment shows that nuclear power has a far higher average cost of generating electricity over the lifespan of a facility than power from renewable sources, Tai said.

  The overheads of nuclear waste processing, as well as the social and economic effects of nuclear disasters, have not been factored into calculations, Tai added.

  Chiu Hua-mei (邱花妹), an assistant professor of sociology at National Sun Yat-sen University, said that Pingtung County residents coexisted with the risk of a nuclear disaster for four decades.

  However, most of them are unaware that the facility faced abnormalities or circumvented regulations 30 times, Chiu said.

  County residents should not be forced to live with nuclear power any longer and to do so would be enacting regional injustice, she said.

  On Monday, a source in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), who asked not to be named, said that DPP politicians and local officials would increase campaigning to urge “no” votes in the referendum.

  “We must directly confront the disinformation and false narratives being disseminated, and also remind the public that the opposition parties have changed their position on nuclear energy,” the source said.

  Many leading figures in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party once opposed nuclear energy, but now they embrace it, they said.

  “Their U-turn is beyond what a normal person would consider reasonable, which shows that the referendum is a mere political show,” they added.

  Additional reporting by Chen Yun
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