Taiwan's nuclear restart: what the domestic debate does not decide
My feature — “Taiwan’s nuclear restart: what the domestic debate does not decide” — runs in Taiwan’s leading English-language daily, the Taipei Times.
The starting point: fuel never burned, stored in the US
Taipower pays NT$100 million to NT$200 million a year to store in the US the bundles it bought for the Lungmen plant, which never opened. Bringing them home would solve nothing: no licensed reactor exists to load them into, and fabricators build each assembly for one specific core. Nothing transfers from one plant to another.
The argument: two separate questions
At home, Taiwan is deciding everything it can decide. The Ma-anshan restart plan is filed, the Nuclear Safety Commission is reviewing it, an environmental impact assessment runs alongside, and the opposition has tabled six referendum proposals for the Nov. 28 local elections. That is the question of whether Taiwan wants reactors.
Whether it can run them is settled elsewhere. Taiwan mines no uranium and buys every stage of the cycle abroad. The 123 agreement covering it was negotiated by the American Institute in Taiwan; safeguards run through a 1964 trilateral agreement that outlived the island’s exclusion from the IAEA in 1971. Taipei signed none of these under its own name, has no supply agency of the Euratom kind, and no seat at the agency that inspects it.
Meanwhile the market is coming apart: Niger moving to nationalize its only working uranium mine, Rosatom controlling roughly 40 percent of global enrichment services, China becoming both marginal buyer and producer of last resort. And the one part of the cycle that genuinely belongs to Taiwan is blocked by a municipal permit — a completion certificate New Taipei City has not issued is holding up part of the national restart timetable.
Whether the reactors come back, Taiwan will decide. Whether anyone can fuel them, maintain them and one day empty them, others will decide: in Niamey, in Moscow, in Washington and in a New Taipei City planning office. None of it appears on the November ballot.