26 Nov (NucNet): Taiwanese voters on Saturday decisively rejected the government’s phaseout of nuclear power, 59% to 41%.
The result was confirmed by the election commission, which said 5,895,560 people ballots had been cast in favour of a pro-nuclear resolution, meeting the required five million votes to pass a referendum ending the phaseout.
According to the commission, 4,014,215 votes were cast against the resolution.
In the same referendum on Saturday Taiwanese voted in favour of maintaining a ban on food from Fukushima Prefecture, the scene of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011. According to the question on the ballot, the ban covers “Fukushima proper and the four surrounding districts and cities of Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma, and Chiba”.
Voters also approved plans to reduce energy from coal by 1% a year and to stop the construction and expansion of coal plants, including one that is already under construction at Shen Ao in northern Taiwan.
The pro-nuclear resolution was put forward by pro-nuclear activists and asked voters if they agreed to repeal Article 95 paragraph 1 of The Electricity Act: ‘The nuclear-energy-based power-generating facilities shall wholly stop running by 2025’?
“We will immediately ask the government to start-up non-operating reactors and extend the lives of the others,” said Shih-Hsiu Huang, a ‘Go Green With Nuclear’ referendum organiser.
The referendum was initially turned down by the government-run election commission, which said organisers lacked the 281,745 valid signatures needed.
The pro-nuclear campaigners went to court, which ruled in October that the commission must count a second batch of 23,251 signatures. After the commission did so, it qualified the initiative for the ballot.
Proposers of the referendum argued that nuclear energy is a safe, clean source of electricity that can allow time for the development of other sources of green energy without damaging the environment or contributing to global warming.
Taiwan has four commercially operational nuclear power reactors at two sites – Kuosheng and Maanshan. According to data by the International Atomic Energy Agency, nuclear power provided about 9% of Taiwan’s electricity output in 2017.
Chinshan, Taiwan’s third nuclear power station, has two units which were permanently shut down earlier this month, according to the IAEA.
Construction of a fourth nuclear power station at Lungmen was suspended following the March 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi accident in Japan. Two of four planned units were almost completed at the time the project was discontinued.
