Nuclear-Free Homeland Has Degenerated to State of Ignoring Human Lives
2017/11/13
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Nuclear-Free Homeland Has Degenerated to State of Ignoring Human Lives
United Daily News Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)
November 9, 2017
Translation of an Excerpt
The "nuclear-free homeland" pushed by President Tsai as her campaign strategy, set its target at 2025 and aimed to stir up political rivalry. It was not evaluated cautiously, pragmatically or with scientific calculations.
Since the Tsai government was inaugurated a year and a half ago, the "nuclear-free homeland" has undergone three levels of vetting, with the situation turning more serious at each level. The first level is the vetting of whether the power supply is adequate: from the second half of last year up to now, the operating reserve rate indicates a state of stress, flashing Orange and Red lights during the summer and autumn. On August 15 this year, a serious blackout even occurred throughout the nation. This shows that Taiwan Power has come to its wits end in coping with the nuclear-free homeland, and the government didn’t know what to do, either. The second level is the vetting of the rising cost of electricity: although the government has pushed for green energy with great efforts, solar power and LNG-fired power generation are restrained by capacity, climate and environmental factors, thus, the increased power generation has been extremely limited. More seriously, these types of green energy will bring with them high amounts of subsidies. Premier Lai Ching-te has said that in the next decade, the electricity price will be hiked no more than NT$ 1, in actuality, on the basis of the current electricity price [ NT$ 2.5 per kWh (US$ 0.8)], that means an increase of 40%, which, we are afraid, could even be an underestatement. Moreover, the mothballing of Nuclear Power Plant No. 4 incurs a loss of several hundred billion NT dollars; the Tsai government completely shies away from talking about this. The third level, and the most serious one, is that in order to push for a "nuclear-free homeland," the government is ignoring the price of exploiting the environment and harming the human body. With respect to the former, for example, solar panels are planted on farmland and ponds, leading to the destruction of these farms and ponds. With respect to the latter, massively increasing coal-fired power generation causing a deterioration of air pollution, leaves millions of residents to live in the pollution of smog and haze, harming their health. Environmentalists describe this as "power generation by lungs”; these, we are afraid, are the most tragic and dreadful sequela of the non-nuclear homeland policy.
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