Last Thursday, Kuomintang caucus whip Lai Shyh-bao unveiled the question the ruling party wants to ask in its proposed referendum on Taiwan's Fourth Nuclear Power Plant at Gongliao, officially called Longmen Plant by its operator Taiwan Power Company, and known popularly as Nuke 4. The question is: “Do you agree to halt construction on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant and to prevent it from becoming operational?”
The Democratic Progressive Party is certainly opposed to such a question. Its chairman, Su Tseng-chang, declared that his party “cannot accept that kind of question,” condemning the Kuomintang for “taking a round-about way to get Nuke 4 to become operational.” Anti-nuclear activists took to the streets in Taipei and four other cities on Saturday to call for the scrapping of Nuke 4 and for Taiwan to be turned into a “Zero Nuclear Paradise.”
However they may oppose, eligible voters will go to the polls this summer, probably before the end of August as the Central Election Commission has suggested, to answer “yes” or “no” to the question the Kuomintang wants to ask in the referendum. The opposition party has little chance of stopping the ramming through of the Kuomintang referendum proposal at the Legislative Yuan, even though its lawmakers would try to occupy the podium to abort a plenary session, just as they did to try to prevent the lifting of the ban on ractopamine-containing U.S. beef imports not too long ago.
K.C. Lee, executive secretary of the Citizen of the Earth Taiwan, said the reasons the Kuomintang presented to justify the referendum are “biased and dogmatic,” and that the referendum is “of no use,” vowing to hold more demonstrations and threatening to enforce weightier, unequivocal public opinion to “directly stop construction of Nuke 4.”
Well, Su and Lee are quite right in part of what they said. The Kuomintang wants to have Nuke 4 start operation by proposing a referendum that it is sure won't pass. The Referendum Law stipulates that a referendum in which not more than 50 percent of the electorate does take part is null and void, and everybody knows there won't be that much turnout come Referendum Day. That's why the question asked is “agree to stop.” If invalid, the referendum permits Taipower to complete the construction of Nuke 4, which will then become operational. Lee is right because the referendum, even if passed, is “of no use.”
Let me cite one example to prove Lee is right. Italy is the world's third country to go nuclear-free. It held a referendum and began to phase out nuclear power in 1987, only a year after the world's first nuclear disaster had occurred at Chernobyl. It closed down all of its four nuclear power plants, the last one in 1990. It had a moratorium on construction of nuclear power plants, which was originally effective from 1987 until 1998 but has been extended indefinitely. It needs electricity, of course.
So Italy imports it from its neighbor France, where nuclear-generated power is more than plentiful enough for export. In recent years, however, Italy's largest electricity utility, Enel S.p.A, has been making investments in reactors in France and Slovakia to provide more imported electric power and in the development of the EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) technology.
In October 2005 there was a seminar sponsored by the government about the possibility of reviving Italian nuclear power and the fourth cabinet of Silvio Berlusconi tried to implement a nuclear power plan, but the Italians voted overwhelmingly in a 2011 referendum to keep their country non-nuclear again.
In other words, all the Italian referendums prior to the one in 2011 are of little use in a country that can import electricity from its neighbors. There will be another if the EPR technology — the third-generation pressurized water reactor design — makes nuclear power safer.
So, what will happen in Taiwan, a place that can't import any power from its neighbors like Japan, mainland China and South Korea, where nuclear power generation continues to supply their needs?
Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011, which triggered the revival of Taiwan's current anti-nuclear movement, was a combination of negligence, inadequate safeguards, design faults and a laissez faire regulatory structure. The earthquake and the tsunami that followed started the crisis, but had there been no such combination, the Fukushima disaster would have been much less severe and much less expensive. No records show Taiwan has been hit by a magnitude-9 earthquake and a devastating tsunami. The probability of an East Japan great earthquake occurring along the eastern coast of Taiwan is near zero.
There is a big discrepancy between two polls conducted less than two years apart. One of them was done by the Academia Sinica in June 2011, three months after the Fukushima disaster. It showed a mere 2.7 percent of the respondents agreed to stop nuclear power generation in Taiwan.
According to the other, conducted by the Want Want China Times Public Opinion Survey Center a week ago, the like-minded respondents accounted for 49.3 percent. It's hard to reconcile the discrepancy, even though poll findings are often quite flippant. And a referendum is very much like a public opinion survey, the outcome being likely to change from one to the other done in less than a year's time.
But one thing is certain. Before a breakthrough occurs in the development of new energy technologies, nuclear energy is one of the low-carbon and cheap energy options. That's why the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Korea and 20 other countries around the world continue to rely on nuclear energy, while Taiwan, Japan, Belgium, Sweden and France wish to eventually become nuclear-free by weaning themselves off nuclear power over a long period of time.
All this is known well to all clear-thinking people of Taiwan. There is only one reason why Taiwan needs nuclear energy. Nuke 4 should be kept, if Taiwan wants to sustain its economic development at an acceptable cost for the benefit of all the people without violating the Kyoto Protocol, though it is not a signatory to it. More eligible voters will stay away from the polls to let the Kuomintang referendum on Nuke 4 slip.
〈本文僅供參考，不代表本會立場〉
（本文刊載於102.03.11，The China Post）
王順民
(
19 小時前
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曾復生
(
20 小時前
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呂啟元
(
2012年10月26日 17:58
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