Taiwan is preparing to bring back nuclear power after a decade spent phasing it out, with the Maanshan plant in the south able to resume generation as early as 2028, according to the Central News Agency. Last month the Nuclear Safety Commission said it had finished reviewing plans to restart a reactor that was shut down in May last year.
Rising demand from the semiconductor and AI industries is behind the shift. The government expects electricity use to grow about 2.5 per cent a year, partly because of chip plants and data centres. Taiwan imports about 96 per cent of its energy, and last year liquefied natural gas supplied about 47 per cent of its electricity, coal 35 per cent and renewables 13 per cent. It missed the 2025 target of 20 per cent renewable power set by former president Tsai Ing-wen’s government. Tsung-Kuang Yeh, dean of the College of Nuclear Science at National Tsing Hua University, said power outages and gas price spikes had sharpened worries about energy security.
Public opinion has moved. In a referendum last year about 4.3 million people voted to reopen the plant and about 1.5 million voted against, but the Central Election Commission rejected the result because turnout was too low. A further vote, on whether to scrap the Nuclear-Free Homeland policy, is set for November. James Liao, a research fellow at Academia Sinica, said nuclear power has a far smaller carbon footprint than coal, while adding that Taiwan should keep promoting renewables.
Safety and waste remain concerns. Low-level waste was shipped to Orchid Island until 1996, when protests over the lack of Indigenous consent stopped the practice, and it is still stored there. State utility Taipower has said indoor dry storage at Maanshan could be ready as early as 2031, which Kuang Ling Lim of the environmental group Citizens of the Earth called “only an intermediate solution”. Taipower did not respond to questions about safety upgrades at the plant.
Some doubt one plant will make much difference. Maanshan supplied about 4 to 5 per cent of Taiwan’s total generation before it closed, according to the Energy Administration, and Benjamin Pei-Wei Yang of the Taiwan Climate Action Network said a restart would add little. Of the island’s other plants, Chinshan is too deteriorated to reopen and Kuosheng faces problems with fuel removal. Yeh argued the extra capacity would still help keep the grid stable.
