20110324 Could Taiwan be the next Japan?

Could Taiwan be the next Japan?

By Engelbert Altenburger 古堡

The cataclysm In Japan has affected the whole of humanity. The devastating impact upon the world’s most densely populated and sophisticated nation, which was the first to experience the atrocities of the atomic bomb, released a deluge of biblical proportion and has stoked fears of doomsday, as if to fulfill popular prophecies — Nostradamus, the Mayan calendar, Yisrayl Hawkins, etc.

Reports on this cataclysm are mortifying: the seismic movement along an active fault line and resultant massive earthquake; the significant upsurge of the sea floor, creating tsunami waves both directly submerging the coastal plains of northeastern Honshu and traveling across the Pacific Ocean as far as California’s coastline; the total destruction of agricultural land and towns; the danger of nuclear reactors and their deadly failures; the spread of lethal radiation; snow and ice; hunger and privation; the blackouts in Tokyo’s 35 million metropolis; the chaos; the worldwide shock; the exodus.

How many lives lost? How many hundred billions of US dollars of economic loss?

Shameful arguments — media hype and cynical comments — are now evolving, while the world is praying for those struggling for their lives or sacrificing themselves in the shadows of fright.

The pros and cons are not only about what topic to discuss first, the devastating earthquake and/or the tsunami or nuclear safety, but also about the truth of “clean” and “necessary” energy from nuclear power.

Maybe University of Cambridge professor David Spiegelhalter wanted to calm the victims traumatized by the outcome of the March 11 earthquake when he talked about “an invisible hazard [that is] mysterious and not understood, associated with dire consequences such as cancer and birth defects [that] feels unnatural” and “media coverage tells us more about ourselves than it does about the threat of radiation.”

However, maybe by rating the tsunami as a bigger tragedy than the nuclear threat, he might also work for the UK’s and the world’s powerful nuclear -lobbies that staunchly defend their -position. Hardly ever have they been so unapologetic to their opponents, who have been fighting for a nuclear free world since 1952 and for a world free from the major foreseen danger of nuclear power. Chernobyl killed more people than commercial airline accidents.

An outcry has also come against discordant notes in China that “hailed the great earthquake and the great tsunami in little Japan,” shown publicly on a poster and streamed through the Internet.

It was quickly stopped by officials, as were the plans for 110 new reactors and 27 new reactors under construction (40 percent of reactors being built worldwide). Reports of China’s reported number of 13 operational reactors and complaints about the Chinese government’s secretiveness were pushed aside in the wake of the deadly and devastating magnitude 5.8 earthquake in western Yunnan just one day before Japan’s nightmare. Was Yunnan really not cool enough for media coverage?

Little more information was given on Taiwan’s nuclear situation. However, by comparing the stability of the country’s power plants to “Buddha’s firm seat on a lotus leaf,” the nation was derided. Taiwan’s nuclear plants have also been rated as “much safer than those in Japan,” with technical facts being confused and Taiwan’s geography simply declared different from that of Japan.

Then followed the bumptious declaration that the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant would definitely be built “in order not to loose large amounts of money because of breaching contracts.”

The question is probably not who will lose money, but how many millions of NT dollars have already been paid as “commission” and to whom.

The blasts at the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant have not only been caused by technical failures, such as seen in other major disasters (eg, Three Mile Island or Chernobyl), but also by the direct impact of a strong earthquake and tsunami. This was released by seismic activity along major fault lines east of Japan, where three plates jolt each other: the Philippine and Pacific plate creeping westward under two different continental plates, while off the northeastern coast of Honshu the Pacific plate also subducts under the Philippine plate.

Japan has a well-recorded history of natural disasters. The extreme tensions of plate movements resulted in the magnitude 6.8 Hanshin earthquake in 1995 that claimed more than 4,000 lives in the Kobe area. The subsequent installation of mechanized facilities to measure seismic intensity brought little benefit, as they could neither efficiently warn of nor hinder future tremors and the resulting human disasters.

In 2004 the devastating magnitude 6.9 Niigata Chuetsu earthquake (200km northwest of Tokyo) struck, and in 2007 the magnitude 6.8 Niigata-ken Chuetsu-Oki earthquake hit. Both quakes were related to a fault line system that divides Honshu island in two parts, where the volcano Mount Fuji rises as one of Japan’s best known landmarks, and where the two continental plates come together.

Japan sits upon the deadliest section of the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire.” Nonetheless, the government and foreign construction companies were not deterred and built nuclear power plants on 20 sites, presently operating 23 pressurized water reactors and 32 boiling water reactors.

Taiwan’s tenuous location on the Ring of Fire is similar. Two different plates creep under each other off the Hengchun Peninsula and off the northeast coast the Philippine plate subducts under the Eurasian plate

Would it not be better to highlight the outmoded 33-year-old Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant with its two ugly, frightening reactors as a potential deadly threat in the midst of Taiwan’s most attractive tourist destination, instead of trivializing it as Pingtung County’s nuclear power plant in no man’s land? This plant stands at the border of the narrow Hengchun Valley, an active fault line that is well connected to the offshore subduction zone, just as Japan’s fault lines are connected to its offshore tectonic borders. Both reactors were designed by General Electric and are yesterday’s second-generation type.

Taiwan is not only “not fully prepared” for catastrophes, it is not prepared at all. Japan, known for its high standards, honest and law-abiding people, might have lost credibility. However, how much trustworthiness may be given to a country where even traffic lights are ignored; where no realistic survival plan exists and no workable alarm system, nor the least awareness about life-threatening building construction?

Probably more people in Taiwan are prone to radiation from radon gas, fire hazards in the many unsafe underground shopping centers, carbon monoxide and benzene poisoning from their cars parked in the sunshine with running engines and air-conditioning on or to radioactive exposure in sub-standard medical environments, than to radioactive contamination from one of the three presently running nuclear plants. The nuclear lobby is delighted about these facts.

The scheduled Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in Gongliao District (貢寮), New Taipei City (新北市), is not far from active undersea volcanoes. Should Taiwan also willfully prepare for a cataclysm or future nuclear incidents?

More than two-thirds of the population already say no. They may keep in mind Japan’s long history of nuclear disasters that includes the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant near Niigata, which was close to the epicenter of an earthquake in 2007. The Fukushima Dai-ichi crisis is the last warning sign to stop nuclear power production.

The Fourth Nuclear Power Plant may be turned into the world’s first nuclear industrial museum and an open center for the development and research of alternative power production. And the world might then soon be able to look on another “never-seen-before” Neuschwanstein castle.

Engelbert Altenburger is an associate professor in I-Shou University’s Department of International Business.