Hotline Asia Urgent Appeals -- UA000721(13)

Action Requested || Sample Letter || Background

Summary

Many social justice, environmental and community groups in Taiwan have called upon other local and international groups to support them in their fight to halt construction of the nuclear power plant number 4 (NPP 4) at Kongliao, 90 km northeast of Taipei.

Taiwan is a small and densely populated country. It already has three operational nuclear power plants, i.e., NPP 1, 2 and 3. If a serious accident were to occur at any of these plants, the cost to the environment and to human lives would be astronomical. Natural disasters cannot be ruled out: nuclear power plants in Taiwan are designed to withstand earthquakes of 0.4G (gravity), but the September 1999 earthquake in Chi Chi, central Taiwan, measured a surface acceleration of 0.98G.

Over the years, the Taiwan Electric Power Company (Tai-Power) has used its economic muscle to propagate the view that nuclear power is cheap and safe. It has used power-outages to falsely create the impression that the country is short of electricity, and hence needs to build the fourth power plant. In fact, the costs of constructing and running a nuclear power station are far higher than for a high-efficiency natural gas station. America and most of the industrially developed countries in Europe have abandoned the construction of nuclear power stations for economic reasons and concern over safety and radioactive waste disposal.

Construction of the NPP 4 has already started, but the government has promised to review the project and cancel it if necessary. To this end, the Committee to re-evaluate the NPP 4 has been set up, and will report its findings to the government at the end of September. It is essential that all parties make their voices heard and do not allow the interests of the nuclear industry and big business to prevail.

Groups opposing the plant strongly believe that:

• The government should stop work on the project until the results of the re-evaluation are published

• The government should ensure that the re-evaluation is carried out in a transparent manner and that the views of all parties are taken into account

• The Department of Environmental Protection should disclose all information from the project evaluation carried out by Tai Power, including any problems which were identified.

Please write polite letters to express your concern about this case, urging the government to conduct an open and comprehensive review of the project and to take the wishes of the people of Taiwan into account.

Sample Letter

Background

In the weeks since Chen Shui-Bian was elected president, environmentalists have wondered what would be done about the controversial NPP 4. The Minister of Economics for the incoming government, Mr. Lin Hsin-Yi, announced that within three to six months a re-evaluation of the project will be completed and that Tai-Power should suspend all construction work for which contracts have not yet been awarded.

The outgoing Ministry of Economics officials stated that huge losses of up to US$2.81 billion would be faced if the project were to be suspended or cancelled. However, others have pointed out that the Ministry seized upon Tai-Power's own worst-case figures and then added on the supposed loss due to lack of electricity and other social costs, as if to try and scare the public. This accounting by Tai-Power fixes the cost of electricity generated from natural gas to be one and a half times the cost of nuclear power. It is instructive, then, to look at the history of nuclear power generation in the rest of the world reviewed by Professor Wang To-Far, Department of Economics, National Taiwan University.

In Britain, according to the Energy Choice Commission of the Lower House of Parliament, in the 1990s the cost of energy produced by advanced gas-cooled reactors was two to three times that of energy produced from fossil fuels. The British Government had no choice but to overturn the policy favouring nuclear power which it had cherished for twenty or more years, and in November 1989 announce the cancellation of plans to build three pressurised water reactors.

In the United States, no new nuclear power plants have been built at all since 1978, and some twenty have been closed prematurely. Between 1972 and 1990 plans for 119 nuclear plants were cancelled, among them 47 which were already under construction. A report by the United States Department of Energy for the period 1986-1991 showed that the cost of nuclear power was on average 1.5 to 2.0 times that of power derived from fossil fuels.

Theoretically nuclear plants should remain operational for 40 years, but in practice a figure of 25 is more realistic due to rising maintenance and safety costs as the plant ages. Plants in the US have operated for an average of only 14 years and the average worldwide is 17. Taiwan's plants have already been operating for 21, 19 and 17 years respectively, so the country may soon be faced with the question of what to do with redundant plant and all the nuclear materials it contains.

Furthermore, Tai-Power still has no resolution to the difficult question of what to do with its nuclear waste. Nuclear power generation produces spent fuel rods containing radioactive substances with a half-life measured in thousands of years. The burden of safely looking after this waste will be borne by future generations that had no part in its production.

Bearing in mind these findings, opponents to the plant find it hard to believe the cost predictions being put forward by Tai-Power and its supporters. Furthermore, past experience has shown that nuclear power plants in Taiwan always go into tremendous cost overruns. Both NPP No.2 and NPP No.3 cost almost three times their original budget. Opponents to the plant are challenging Tai-Power and the Ministry of Economics' continued claim that nuclear power is cheap.

(For more information visit www.nonukesasiaforum.org)

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