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Taiwan Shuts Down Its Last Nuclear Reactor (france24.com) 80

Posted by EditorDavid from the power's-out dept.
The only nuclear power plant still operating in Taiwan was shut down on Saturday, reports Japan's public media organization NHK: People in Taiwan have grown increasingly concerned about nuclear safety in recent years, especially after the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, northeastern Japan... Taiwan's energy authorities plan to focus more on thermoelectricity fueled by liquefied natural gas. They aim to source 20 percent of all electricity from renewables such as wind and solar power next year.
AFP notes that nuclear power once provided more than half of Taiwan's energy, with three plants operating six reactors across an island that's 394 km (245 mi) long and 144 km (89 mi) wide.

So the new move to close Taiwan's last reactor is "fuelling concerns over the self-ruled island's reliance on imported energy and vulnerability to a Chinese blockade," — though Taiwan's president insists the missing nucelar energy can be replace by new units in LNG and coal-fired plants: The island, which targets net-zero emissions by 2050, depends almost entirely on imported fossil fuel to power its homes, factories and critical semiconductor chip industry. President Lai Ching-te's Democratic Progressive Party has long vowed to phase out nuclear power, while the main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party says continued supply is needed for energy security... [The Ma'anshan Nuclear Power Plant] has operated for 40 years in a region popular with tourists and which is now dotted with wind turbines and solar panels. More renewable energy is planned at the site, where state-owned Taipower plans to build a solar power station capable of supplying an estimated 15,000 households annually. But while nuclear only accounted for 4.2 percent of Taiwan's power supply last year, some fear Ma'anshan's closure risks an energy crunch....

Most of Taiwan's power is fossil fuel-based, with liquefied natural gas (LNG) accounting for 42.4 percent and coal 39.3 percent last year. Renewable energy made up 11.6 percent, well short of the government's target of 20 percent by 2025. Solar has faced opposition from communities worried about panels occupying valuable land, while rules requiring locally made parts in wind turbines have slowed their deployment.

Taiwan's break-up with nuclear is at odds with global and regional trends. Even Japan aims for nuclear to account for 20-22 percent of its electricity by 2030, up from well under 10 percent now. And nuclear power became South Korea's largest source of electricity in 2024, accounting for 31.7 percent of the country's total power generation, and reaching its highest level in 18 years, according to government data.... And Lai acknowledged recently he would not rule out a return to nuclear one day. "Whether or not we will use nuclear power in the future depends on three foundations which include nuclear safety, a solution to nuclear waste, and successful social dialogue," he said.
DW notes there's over 100,000 barrels of nuclear waste on Taiwan's easternmost island "despite multiple attempts to remove them... At one point, Taiwan signed a deal with North Korea so they could send barrels of nuclear waste to store there, but it did not work out due to a lack of storage facilities in the North and strong opposition from South Korea...

"Many countries across the world have similar problems and are scrambling to identify sites for a permanent underground repository for nuclear fuel. Finland has become the world's first nation to build one."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.
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Taiwan Shuts Down Its Last Nuclear Reactor More

Taiwan Shuts Down Its Last Nuclear Reactor

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  • yesterday today (Score:4, Funny)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Sunday May 18, 2025 @12:35PM (#65385071)

    In Taiwan, we follow yesterday's trends today.

    • Complaining about solar taking up land...they haven't heard about or seen the deployment of agrivoltaics?

      Solar taking up land is not nearly as much of a problem as these "yesterday"-thinkers think it is. Sure, they will have to learn which type of deployment methods work best for their geographical location, but for a (relative) high-tech nation that shouldn't be too big a deal, I would assume.

      Then again, "assumptions are the root of all evil"...squared or something.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Taiwan has the worlds most advanced fabs, for example. They are world leaders in technology.

      They can also see the writing on the wall. Their neighbour is moving to renewables at an incredible pace. Clean, safe, cheap. They can also see that China is threatening their high end manufacturing by developing domestic technology, and to remain competitive they need to have access to cheap energy that isn't dependent on other countries e.g. for fuel.

  • There is no way such move, that is clearly against interest of Taiwan, would succeed if not for influence operation by Chinese Communist Party.

  • Good riddance (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tchdab1 ( 164848 ) on Sunday May 18, 2025 @12:44PM (#65385103) Homepage

    The history of nuclear power is a grift of over-promising, over-toxification, under-liability. Renewables have arrived.

    • Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)

      by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Sunday May 18, 2025 @12:57PM (#65385137)

      They are not putting renewables .. they are doubling down on coal .. which has to be imported .. making them highly vulnerable to blockade. Land on easy terrain is highly valuable in Taiwan.

      • >> they are doubling down on coal

        Where did you see that? According to the article they are doubling down on renewables.

        • Re:Good riddance (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Mspangler ( 770054 ) on Sunday May 18, 2025 @04:59PM (#65385621)

          "Most of Taiwan's power is fossil fuel-based, with liquefied natural gas (LNG) accounting for 42.4 percent and coal 39.3 percent last year. "

          Coal and gas actually.

          In the past, "nuclear power once provided more than half of Taiwan's energy,"

          • But that's the current situation. Their near-term goal is 20% renewables.

            "Taiwan's reliance on imported fossil fuels is of particular concern given the risk of a Chinese blockade.
            The island has enough LNG and coal reserves to last just 11 and 30 days, respectively"

      • Imported from Russia, no less. Are we sure that Taiwan is a friendly nation?

    • Re: Good riddance (Score:1, Insightful)

      by flyingfsck ( 986395 )
      Fortunately, modular reactors have also arrived. https://www.zerohedge.com/mark... [zerohedge.com]

    • Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Sunday May 18, 2025 @01:07PM (#65385169) Journal

      Renewables have arrived.

      No they have not. It's even in TFS: the replacement is coal and LNG.

      Taiwan is not very big. To meet Taiwan's energy needs with solar, you would need about 10,000 square km of solar panels, which is a little under a third of the entire land area of the country covered with them. Plus that leaves the knotty problem of what to do at night and when Taiwan is covered by a single weather system which is not hard given it's only 250 miles long.

      It also has small tides, and deep seas.

      What renewables do you expect them to use?

      • After every roof is covered with solar panels, and grid scale batteries are put in place, how much extra land is needed? If more land is needed, there are beneficial ways to integrate solar panels with agriculture and raising livestock. I am also guessing that it can be windy, maybe toss in a few cost effective windmills, and they are all set.

        • After every roof is covered with solar panels, and grid scale batteries are put in place, how much extra land is needed?

          Look, renewables are great, just not in every situation. The GP is on point, renewables are a bad source of energy for a country with such little geographic diversity. Also maybe you should look at Taiwan one day. Your roof at home may be able to sustain solar panels to offset your household use, but what if that one roof with the same surface area is shared with 300 apartments? Rooftop solar will do fuck all to meet Taiwan's energy needs.

      • >> the replacement is coal and LNG

        "They aim to source 20 percent of all electricity from renewables such as wind and solar power next year", no mention of increased fossil fuels.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Taiwan is aiming for about 20% renewable energy this year, up from about 1.5% in 2020.

        Their emissions have probably peaked, and have been dropping of late as renewables replaces coal and gas: https://ourworldindata.org/co2... [ourworldindata.org]

        Of course they are still at a relatively early stage in terms of renewable deployment, and in the short term there might be some increased fossil fuel usage due to the nuclear shut-down, but the trend is pretty clear and renewables are going to continue to increase.

        Of course nobody is s

    • Unless we entirely redesign how we transmit energy, we need way more very large BESS sites before we can dump all of our baseload providers. Until we have the ability to black start a grid from battery reserves we need baseload and nuclear is our only non-carbon baseload source. California showed in 2017 that a 33 MW/20MWh BESS site could black start a 44 MW gas turbine. But we need a lot more than proof of the CONOP -- we need actual batteries installed in all of the grids.

      It took Spain and Portugal a

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        Unless we entirely redesign how we transmit energy, we need way more very large BESS sites

        Who's "we"? Do you have a mouse in your pocket?

        Energy producers are responsible for ensuring their source's reliability. Including securing spinning reserves to cover the eventuality that their plant suffers a failure and they are still obligated to meet their contractual delivery requirements.

        "We need batteries! Who's going to provide them? Not I, said the horse." [lavendersb...school.com] Somebody missed that lesson in nursery school. I guess it's not covered in Drag Queen Story Time.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 )

      The history of nuclear power is a grift of over-promising, over-toxification, under-liability. Renewables have arrived.

      Yeah we know, renewables are going to save the world. The problems is solved, so I needn't care anymore. Fortunately I don't.

      In reality, I'm just going to sit back, enjoy life, and watch you fail. Content in the knowledge that I am not complicit or participating in your failure. Have fun!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

      The history of nuclear power is a grift of over-promising, over-toxification, under-liability. Renewables have arrived.

      Taiwan is a probably the best case study you'll ever find on why nuclear power is expensive--start, stop, start, stop, delay, delay, delay, then mothball the plant after you finish building it but before it generates any commercial power.

  • The PRC ... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ... will straighten them out on nuclear power. Soon.

  • Ah, nuclear power (Score:4, Informative)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday May 18, 2025 @01:50PM (#65385257)

    The gift that keeps on being excessively expensive long after it has been shut down.

  • Expect a reverasl on nuclear policy, like in Japan (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MacMann ( 7518492 ) on Sunday May 18, 2025 @01:52PM (#65385261)

    Japan wanted to be rid of nuclear power after the meltdowns at Fukushima but that didn't last long. As Japan fired up more coal power to replace nuclear fission they saw energy costs rise and air quality drop. Even though the tsunami destroyed the power plant there were something like a half dozen dead from the flooding, and maybe two deaths from radiation. There's no knowing for sure if the people died from radiation as their cancer could have had other causes. There is a huge mess at the power plant that needs to be cleaned up, which will cost a lot of money, but that can be blamed on being unprepared for a tsunami of such magnitude on a general nationwide scale. The issues of seawalls being too short, inhabited structures too close to the shore, and so much else that resulted in considerable loss of life and property damage was not unique to Fukushima. Japan is much better prepared for that now.

    Taiwan will have similar concerns of earthquakes and tsunami potentially damaging a nuclear power plant. What we saw in Japan was the reactors scrammed into a safe state once the earthquake hit, and had that been the end of it then we would not have seen any major issues with nuclear power in Japan. The matter of flooding can be addressed by building power plants on high enough ground and/or putting up proper seawalls.

    A large part of what made Fukushima a problem was the delay of construction of two new nuclear reactors on that site. There were six operational units on the site with units 7 & 8 delayed over protests. What this did was create a problem of needing to keep the older and less durable reactors in operation beyond their designed life span or face an energy shortage. The new reactors would have been built to withstand more powerful earthquakes, and would have had more robust cooling systems to prevent a meltdown in the case of an earthquake induced scram.

    Taiwan would not be building any nuclear power reactor like those operating in Fukushima in 2011. Taiwan would be building new reactors with what happened at Fukushima in mind. That means not putting emergency diesel generators in the basement where they can be flooded. It means having standardized electrical connectors for hooking up emergency generators that could be airlifted in by helicopters. It means new operating procedures.

    These nuclear power reactors in Taiwan were built in the 1980s with an expected operational life of 60 years, and yet they are shutting them down after 40 years? I expect these reactors will be restarted in a few years. Once Taiwan sees energy costs rise and air quality drop there will be people changing their minds on nuclear power.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Japan's problem is that they want to use domestic technology for everything, and their manufacturers like Mitsubishi are well behind on renewable technology. They have good wind resources, for example, but don't have the turbines to exploit it.

      Nuclear has always been unpopular. Companies owning nuclear plants that were forced to shut down after the Fukushima meltdowns want to start them up because those are big investments that cost them money to maintain but don't produce any profit.

      As for these magical ne

  • Taiwan has zero uranium reserves, so precisely nothing has changed for energy independence. Even before the shutdown Taiwan imported 98% of their energy.

    • According to the article "Renewable energy made up 11.6 percent, well short of the government's target of 20 percent by 2025" so not 98% imported. Most likely they will be trying to boost the renewables as much as possible.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by butlerm ( 3112 )

      Imports required, yes. but the energy density of enriched uranium rods is thousands of times higher than something like oil, coal, or natural gas. Meaning you could import enough to last you for a decade and store it onsite, no trouble at all. It is normal for those rods to last for eighteen months, and they aren't even highly enriched. Switch to highly enriched uranium like nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers use and the nuclear fuel storage situation would improve by roughly a factor of seven. An

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Creepy ( 93888 )

        Largely my argument, too, but due to Kerry killing the US experimental breeder reactor in 1994, you have one choice for the technology, Russia. Mainland China of course bought it, but since Taiwan is where the anti-communists fled and were never exterminated, no chance of them ever getting it. Private companies have been working on fast reactors mostly based on thorium like LFTR, but nuclear waste is also fertile and the only company developing that technology that I know of folded.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

      Taiwan has zero uranium reserves, so precisely nothing has changed for energy independence. Even before the shutdown Taiwan imported 98% of their energy.

      That's missing the forest for the trees. Taiwan has to constantly import coal and natural gas. Tens of millions of tons of fuel per year getting burned. Compare to the ABWRs that they mothballed/cancelled with, what, a couple of hundred tons of fuel that gets replaced every half decade or so?

      Now imagine they have a hostile neighbor with the ability to blockade them.

  • An island nation should harness the tides and ocean currents for power. Yes, if it was easy everyone would be doing it. But there are lots of smart people over there and elsewhere which huge budgets. Figure it out.

  • I get sad when I watch a country commit suicide by stupid decision. It's made worse this time because it shows China won't have to invade. They just have to be patient and wait for Taiwan to finish it's protracted suicide. Then it can simply move in with no guns or any fuss at all.
    {o.o}

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