Nuclear power is not about achieving a carbon-neutral economy, but about maintaining current carbon emissions for the benefit of large corporations’ profits.
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By Michael Turton / Contributing Reporter
Last week, this newspaper published a translated editorial from its parent newspaper, the Liberty Times, calling for a reconsideration of Taiwan’s nuclear-free stance (“The Liberty Times Editorial: Re-examine the nuclear-free stance,” August 20, 2024). The editorial pointed out that fossil fuels still account for over 80 percent of energy production, renewable energy is progressing slowly, and nuclear power may well be necessary.
In the same week, Taipower received approval to begin work on a dry storage facility in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) for the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant’s spent nuclear fuel. The spent fuel rods will be removed in 2026 and the decommissioning of the plant, a 25-year process, will begin.
This will undoubtedly trigger a new round of nuclear debate, with nuclear advocates arguing that Taiwan can be saved by the magic of modular reactors, or by restarting the reactors currently in place, or by rebuilding and then restarting the fourth nuclear power plant, which was doomed from the start.
Photo courtesy of Taipower
POWER REQUIREMENT
I expect many will be surprised if some sort of compromise is reached on the reactors, with power flowing again but electricity supply still in short supply. The reactors have never been very reliable, and this is likely to be even less the case with reactors that are restarted. But the real problem is not the power supply or its (sometimes patchy) management: it is the demand for electricity.
When new energy sources come online, electricity users will immediately expand their usage plans, just as when new roads are built, people immediately put cars on them, reproducing the traffic problem the new roads were supposed to solve. Currently, the media is focused on energy demand for artificial intelligence, which is expected to boom starting next year as servers and data centers come online and energy demand is expected to rise by three percent over the next decade. Most of that will come in the next five years, far too soon for new nuclear power plants to come online.
Photo: Reuters
In addition to AI, we can also expect a boom in electric vehicles. At the moment, the industry is at an impasse as local institutions such as schools, businesses and residential communities are resistant to infrastructure changes. But over time, this resistance will be overcome.
Therefore, this situation, where we are still at the breaking point, where the government has to constantly reassure people that there is enough power, and where massive, costly blackouts keep occurring, is likely to continue indefinitely, like any other emergency.
A helpful article by Jordan McGillis in the Global Taiwan Institute last year highlights the problems with our power system: a severe lack of resilience. As he notes, the power system is too centralized because Taiwan’s electricity is generated in the center and south but consumed in the north – emblematic of how Taipei treats the rest of Taiwan as a colony. Thus, periodic power disasters are the inevitable result of the system’s over-centralization: “What should be isolated failures can instead become cascading disasters affecting the entire island.”
The government is trying to deal with this in two ways, says McGillis. The first is a 10-year resilience program. The second is isolating the industrial parks from the supply system in the event of another (inevitable) power disaster.
These programs, including the restart of nuclear power plants, are stopgap measures that address important problems, but they will not solve the electricity problem. The electricity problem is not a lack of electricity, but one of energy management: government policies are aimed at controlling supply, not demand. Instead, Taiwan suffers from wasteful, excessive demand caused by Taiwan’s artificially low electricity prices.
CHEAP ELECTRICITY
How low are they? According to Taipower’s own data, Taiwan has the third lowest prices in the industrialized world for industrial electricity and the fifth lowest for residential electricity. Industrial electricity is cheaper in Taiwan than in China and Korea.
Low electricity prices are also a reason for Taiwan’s high carbon dioxide emissions.
The Confederation of China Industries (CFNI), a major business lobby in Taiwan, has long fought for subsidized electricity and water. But talk of hard work and progress in the electronics industry obscures the extent to which this and other industries depend on subsidized electricity and water for their profits.
In agriculture, electricity for groundwater pumps is also cheap. In the Chuoshui River alluvial fan area in Changhua and Yunlin, there are over 170,000 such pumps causing severe subsidence, according to government data cited in a local study. From an energy perspective, our agriculture is actually a mining industry that converts cheap electricity into vegetables.
This means that the business lobby’s “incorporation of nuclear energy into the energy mix,” as one often hears it, is not about reducing carbon dioxide emissions or about moving forward. As domestic researchers Chou Kuei-Tien (周桂田) and Liou Hwa-Meei (劉華美) point out in an excellent article on the carbon tax that examines these issues, “incorporating nuclear energy into the energy mix” allows domestic manufacturers to maintain the current economic conditions in which gasoline, electricity, water, interest rates, and wages are kept artificially low to serve the profits of a few people who are already multi-billionaires.
I repeat: nuclear energy is not about achieving a carbon neutral economy. It is about maintaining current carbon emissions for the benefit of big business profits. When nuclear power plants are restarted, companies will buy another decade of cheap electricity and our zombie companies will buy another decade of mindless, aimless living.
The CNFI has put pressure on the government, criticising it for the “five deficiencies” of land, water, electricity, skilled workers and labour. Like the discourse on nuclear power, this is not aimed at maintaining the current economic situation, but at demanding more subsidies.
If industry really wants skilled workers and a workforce, nothing prevents it from setting up training institutes and implementing human resources policies aimed at boosting the birth rate. Nothing prevents CNFIs from setting up pools to buy land at market prices and develop industrial and business districts. Finally, private companies have already taken action in the face of energy problems, with the Formosa Plastics plant in Mailiao and Taiwan Cement’s Heping power plant, both of which run on coal.
What restarting nuclear power plants really means is that the economy will continue to emit too much carbon because of low electricity prices. As many observers have noted, low electricity prices cause Taiwanese companies to be inefficient. In addition, low interest rates here perpetuate an ecosystem of zombie companies that cannot innovate because they do not make enough money. In reality, the CNFI is not advocating for economic improvement, but the opposite: an innovation-poor, inefficient, carbon-intensive economy that will be a disaster for the global environment and does nothing for the population’s standard of living.
But somewhere, someone who already has too much money will make a big chunk of extra money. And that’s what counts.
Notes from Central Taiwan is a column by long-time resident Michael Turton, who provides incisive commentary based on three decades of living in and engaging with his adopted country. The views expressed here are his own.
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