Above Photo:Â Protesters wrote down what they are willing to do to save energy. Photo is taken by coolloud.org. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Major cities across Taiwan recently witnessed mass demonstrations advocating for renewable energy policy and the decommissioning of the country’s nuclear power stations.
On March 14, as many as 45,000 people protested against the plan of the state-owned Taiwan Power Company for sending abroad 1,200 highly radioactive used fuel rods from the island’s first and second nuclear plants. Reprocessing of these sent fuel rods would extend the service lives of the plants, which are scheduled to go out of service in the next six years. However, the protesters rejected the reprocessing because it is too expensive, and the radioactive products of reprocessing will be eventually sent back to Taiwan.
Two days after the anti-nuke demonstration, the legislators agreed to freeze the Taiwan Power Company’s plan to reprocess the fuel rods overseas.
Concerns about Taiwan’s nuclear power plants have mounted since the Fukushima nuclear accident, which resulted from an earthquake and tsunami hitting Japan in March 2011. Also located on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, Taiwan faces significant risks with its three relatively outdated nuclear power plants.
According to Taiwan’s existing schedule, its first nuclear power plant, launched in 1978, will be decommissioned in 2018, while the second nuclear power plant will operate until 2021. On March 14, protesters across the country demonstrated to hold officials to this schedule, or perhaps even accelerate Taiwan’s shift away from nuclear energy. Â
Chiung-Li Sun, a reporter from the independent journalism platform Events in Focus, Taiwan’s first plant might go offline even sooner than 2018.
Because Taiwan Power Company did not find a suitable place for the final storage site of the nuclear waste, the residents of New Taipei City are worried that their homeland might become the final storage site of the nuclear waste if their government approves the dry-spent-fuel storage. Therefore, given concerns about earthquakes and floods, the New Taipei City Government is unlikely to approve the construction of the dry-spent-fuel storage at the first power plant. On the other hand, the legislators’ decision to suspend the Taiwan Power Company’s plan to reprocess the fuel rods overseas is likely to scrap the Economic Affairs Ministry’s proposal to extend the service life of the First Nuclear Plant, leaving the country’s problems with nuclear waste deadlocked.
Several huge demonstrations have been held in Taiwan since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident. The country even halted the operation of a fourth nuclear power plant, after a clash between anti-nuclear protesters and riot police in front of the Taipei Train Station on April 28, 2014. As the Atomic Energy Council decided in January that the Fourth plant be mothballed later this year in July for three year, the fate of the plant would have to be decided by a referendum to be held before 2018.
As the Fourth plant was designed to replace the First and the Second, with the above-mentioned complications in the launch of the Fourth plant, the Economic Affairs Ministry endorsed the Taiwan Power Company’s proposal to reprocess spent fuel rods abroad in February. However, it denied its intention to extend the service life of the First power plant on March 15 soon after the anti-nuclear demonstration.