Taiwanese review nuclear energy 10 years after Fukushima

福島十年後，台灣人回顧核能

Survey shows people opt for green energy, concerned about nuclear safety


TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A decade after a disastrous tsunami hit eastern Japan, leading to one of the gravest nuclear accidents in history, Taiwanese will be making a decision on whether to break up with nuclear energy for good.

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake-triggered disaster at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, aroused nationwide concern in its neighboring country, Taiwan, where three nuclear plants were in their full swing and the fourth one was on the brink of completion.

Seeing the aftermath of the nuclear disaster, Taiwan had one of its largest anti-nuclear energy protests and forced the ruling government to suspend the operation of its fourth plant. People were also granted a final say through referendums about the future of the country's energy generation.

Although the experience in Fukushima showed nuclear accidents would occur even in places where people are known for cautiousness, the anxiety over power shortages and rising electricity costs has gradually come to surpass the mistrust of nuclear energy in Taiwan.

In a 2018 referendum, Taiwanese voted to scrap a plan that would have shut down all the nuclear plants in the country by 2025. Voters will decide in August 2021 whether to reopen the fourth nuclear plant, which has never been put into operation.

"The focus on the debate between renewable energy and fossil fuels in the past year has seemed to dilute people's worries about the risks of nuclear energy," Legislator Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) said in an interview with Business Today.

However, although many in Taiwan believe nuclear energy will help stabilize electricity prices while the country embraces more renewable energy sources over the coming years, around 51 percent of responses in a survey done by Business Today in early March showed little or no confidence in the fourth nuclear plant meeting safety requirements with its original design.

The polling results also showed 66 percent of Taiwanese believed the government should use renewable energy to replace nuclear energy, while 49.1 percent agreed to reasonable rises in electricity prices to maintain a stable power supply.

In his memoir “My Nuclear Nightmare” about his experience with the Fukushima nuclear disaster, former Japanese Prime Minister Kan Naoto confessed that Japanese society had been established on the assumption that no massive accidents would ever happen at nuclear plants, so the country built 54 of them.

"A plan to evacuate and settle 50 million people for decades — that was what kept playing in my head after that assumption was pulverized," said the minister.