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Lawmakers urge government to stop building No. 4 nuclear plant

ROC Central News Agency

2011/03/14 21:51:23

By Wen Kuei-hsiang, Sofia Yeh & Bear Lee

Taipei, March 14 (CNA) Legislators across party lines on Monday backed the immediate suspension of work on Taiwan's No. 4 nuclear power plant to review safety concerns in the wake of the problems faced by a Japanese plant following Friday's magnitude 9.0 earthquake.

The Legislative Yuan's Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee approved a motion sponsored by lawmakers Tien Chiu-chin, Liu Chien-kuo and Chen Chieh-ju of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) calling for the suspension of construction until safety concerns were addressed.

It was endorsed by legislators of the ruling Kuomintang, including Kuo Su-chun.

Hsu Hwai-chiung, the vice president of state-owned utility that is building the plant, warned, however, that an abrupt halt in construction would be unwise because it would lead to the violation of contracts and financial liabilities.

The Taiwan Power Company executive suggested as an alternative a complete safety check after construction was completed.

The resolution would only serve as a way to put political pressure on the government to shut down work at the plant because it is not legally enforceable.

Tien said at a press conference earlier in the day that the government should upgrade the nuclear plant's capacity to resist earthquakes.

The No. 4 nuclear power plant was designed to meet a seismic coefficient of 0.4g, far lower than that of the crippled plant in Japan's Fukushima prefecture, which had a coefficient of 0.6g, Tien said.

Though the Japanese facility should be the safer of the two, it still succumbed to a magnitude 9.0 earthquake that devastated the northeastern part of Honshu.

Tien said the plant under construction in Gongliao, New Taipei City, sits near geological faults and undersea volcanoes, and if a natural disaster occurred, the consequences could be far more severe than those seen at the plant in Fukushima.

DPP lawmaker Wong Chin-chu questioned the safety of the No. 4 plant because of its 700 redesigns, 180 of them made by Taiwan without the approval of General Electric Co., the U.S. supplier of the nuclear generators.

Wong proposed that the government invite experts from home and abroad to conduct a through examination of the plant to see if it conforms with international safety standards. If experts say it is unsafe, she said, the government should be bold enough to turn it into a museum.

Professor Lee Chao-hsing of National Taiwan Ocean University said at the conference that there are over 70 undersea volcanoes -- 11 of them active -- within an 80-kilometer radius of the Gongliao project, and the government needed to prepare for a worst-case scenario.

Partial operation of the No. 4 nuclear power plant is scheduled to begin in December 2012 although construction will only be fully completed a year after that.

Hundreds of thousands of residents near the Fukushima plant have been evacuated after partial meltdowns in two of its reactors led to releases of radiation.