A very long fight in Asia
THE re-election of Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou means an uphill battle for local environmentalists like Aiya Hsu, she said. "It's going to be a long fight," Hsu, a co-ordinator for Green Citizens' Action Alliance, Taiwan, said in an interview in Yokohama, where an antinuclear conference was held this week.
"People have to keep raising their voice, telling the government to phase out nuclear power." Hsu said Ma's party has long supported nuclear energy while opposition candidate Tsai Ing-wen vowed to eliminate it from the island nation.
Taiwan has three nuclear power plants, each with two reactors. A fourth power station has been under construction since the late 1990s, but has been plagued by management and engineering problems, Hsu said.
The construction delays have inflated its price tag to $9 billion from the original estimate of $5 billion, she said.
Two of the three plants are located near the capital Taipei in the northern part of the quake-prone country. If a major accident occurs, about 6 million people would have to evacuate, Hsu said.
She added Taiwan also has a controversial nuclear waste disposal site in Lan Yu, where indigenous people live.
But the Fukushima disaster made more Taiwanese people take to the streets as they became aware of the risks involved in atomic energy.
"We're going to hold a massive demonstration on March 11," she said, referring to the first anniversary of the start of Japan's nuclear crisis.
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station was hit by the devastating quake and tsunami on that date in 2011, triggering the disaster by causing meltdowns at three of its six reactors.
Following the disaster, some European countries have promised to phase out nuclear power, but countries across Asia continue to pursue it to accelerate their economic development.
Industry and government supporters say nuclear power plants produce large quantities of electricity relatively cheaply, once the high initial cost of building them has been met.
And nuclear power is free of carbon emissions, which is interesting to coal-powered countries such as China, currently facing international pressure over climate change.
These factors add to the political appeal of nuclear power, and mean a long fight for anti-nuclear activists in the region.
South Korea has 21 nuclear reactors in service and plans to raise the number to 34 by 2024, to boost the ratio of its nuclear-generated electricity to 59 per cent by 2030 from 35 per cent at present, Lee Heon-seok, who leads Energy Justice Action in the country, told the audience in Yokohama.
He said South Korea also wants to make the nuclear industry one of the nation's major exporters, especially after its consortium won a $20 billion contract to build nuclear reactors in the United Arab Emirates in 2009.
After Japan's disaster, however, more people started to get involved in anti-nuclear protests, he added.
China, with 13 active nuclear reactors, has 28 more under construction and wants to increase the number to 102. But soon after the Fukushima disaster, approval of new nuclear power plants has been suspended and Beijing is likely to invest more in solar and wind power, Fu Tao, editor of China Development Brief, said at the conference.
With Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia also showing strong interest in nuclear energy, Japanese companies are eager to promote sales of nuclear technology in the region, in particular as business prospects in their own country have dimmed since the Fukushima disaster.
Japanese civic groups and environmentalists are especially concerned about Japan's planned construction on the coast of central Vietnam. Tokyo has secured contracts in 2010 to build two nuclear reactors near Nui Chua National Park.
During his visit to Japan in late October, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung told Industry Minister Yukio Edano that he wants to make his nation's import of Japanese reactors a "symbol of their strategic bilateral relationship," Kyodo News reported, citing Japanese government officials.
However, "local residents have very little information about nuclear power and there is no discussion on the construction," said Kanna Mitsuta, a researcher for Friends of the Earth (FOE) Japan and Mekong Watch, who visited the region where Vietnam plans to have two nuclear power plants.