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EDITORIAL: Nuclear
waste cannot be ignored
Questions have been raised again about the safety of the Fourth Nuclear Power
Plant, which is still under construction. The Atomic Energy Council asked Taiwan
Power Co (Taipower) to provide a list by the end of the year of the structural
changes it will make to ensure safe operations at the plant, following the
release of a paper by a nuclear engineer and adviser to the council that
highlights construction flaws.
However, of even greater concern than the proposed start-up of the fourth plant
in 2014 is that Taiwan has almost run out of space to store the nuclear waste
that has been produced since the nation’s first three plants became operational.
And the government has almost no feasible options for new containment sites.
The two facilities that collect waste from the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in
Shihmen District (石門), New Taipei City (新北市) — the first one built — are at
89.95 and 85.5 percent of capacity, the Ministry of Audit said on July 29. The
storage unit for the Guosheng plant in Wanli (萬里), New Taipei City, is more than
70 percent full and the unit for the Ma-anshan plant in Ma-anshan (馬鞍山),
Pingtung County, is almost half full.
Construction of spent fuel dry-storage facilities will not begin until April
2015 at the earliest — that’s if the Ministry of Economic Affairs can figure out
where to build the facility in the first place. Not surprisingly, the counties
that have been mentioned as possible sites are not keen on the idea. Why should
they be when they can see the disastrous way Taipower has run its waste storage
facility on Orchid Island, not to mention its lackadaisical approach to
maintentance at the plants themselves?
The government selected Longmen (龍門) on Orchid Island’s southern tip for what
was billed as a “temporary” nuclear waste disposal facility, even though it
planned to store as many as 340,000 barrels there over a 50-year period. It lied
to the people of the island for years, telling them it was building a fish
cannery. Shipments of nuclear waste from Taiwan proper began in May 1982 and
continued until 1996. However, a three-year-long inspection and rehousing
project that began in 2008 found that 78,000 of the 98,112 barrels stored in
more than a score of concrete trenches at the repository were rusted. It seems
no one realized that Orchid Island’s high temperatures, high humidity and salty
environment might make it a bad place to store iron containers in an open-air
facility.
Then there are the complaints about accidents and poor maintenance at the three
operating plants. Robert Greenspan, president of US-based Midco Diving and
Marine Services, which had been hired to do underwater maintenance at the
Guosheng plant’s suppression pools in late 2008 and early 2009, told the Taipei
Times in April that Taipower’s nuclear power plants looked more “like the back
room of a lousy auto parts store.”
While the Ministry of Audit might win some praise for raising the storage issue,
it is worrisome that it said it noticed the problem while examining government
spending last year. The question of storage is not a new issue. Taipower signed
a deal with North Korea on Jan. 11, 1997, to ship 200,000 barrels of low-level
waste there — an arrangement that was quickly scotched after protests from South
Korea and others — and in 2002 there were reports a deal was being negotiated
with the Solomon Islands to send nuclear waste there.
The government must give its full attention to handling the nuclear waste we
already have before moving ahead with a problem-ridden plant that would only
create more waste. If it is looking for some creative ideas, why not contact
Richard Handl in Sweden. He’s an unemployed guy with an interest in nuclear
physics who spent a couple of months trying to build a nuclear reactor in his
kitchen, with materials sourced from eBay and Germany.
At least he’s proved he thinks outside the box.
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