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AEC cannot set timing for Taipower safety checks: minister

ROC Central News Agency

2013/03/08 18:02:02

Taipei, March 8 (CNA) Taiwan Power Co. (Taipower) should do its best to complete safety checks on the fourth nuclear power plant by the end of the year, but the Cabinet-level Atomic Energy Council (AEC) cannot set a time limit for such checks, AEC chief Tsai chuen-horng said Friday.

Tsai spoke against the background of remarks by Premier Jiang Yi-huah earlier in the week in which he said the Cabinet will do its utomost in terms of safety checks before a referendum on the controversial plant planned for later this year. If the checks can be completed by the time of the referendum, and local and foreign scholars and experts can give assurances on the plant's operation, that would be the ideal situation, Jiang said.

But he also said that "if the checks have not been fully carried out by that date, we hope to have 80 or 90 percent of them completed."

Tsai noted that that the nuclear power plant has suffered a lot of problems during the construction process.

Taipower has recently sorted out some of the unresolved problems and is expected to have them fixed by the end of the year, according to Tsai.

He said that before a planned referendum on the fate of the plant, construction will continue.

"For the AEC, the most important thing is to ensure safety during tests," Tsai said.

Meanwhile, Hsu Ming-teh, director of the AEC's Department of Nuclear Technology, said a review of its plan to expand emergency planning zones (EPZs) in case of emergencies at nuclear power plants is expected to be completed in June and the necessary installations completed by the end of the year.

Hsu was responding to questions by opposition Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Ho Hsin-tsun, who pointed out that the AEC had proclaimed that the size of the zones for the first, second, and third nuclear power plants will be expanded from the original area of a radius of five kilometers surrounding the reactors of three nuclear power plants to eight kilometers in October 2011.

Despite this, she said, the AEC has yet to put forth any such plan.

(By Tseng Ying-yu, Wen Kuei-hsiang and Lilian Wu)