giardini
14 hours ago
Taiwan has 4 nuclear plants that IIRC they've chosen to not run *purely for political reasons*. The (imo crazy and crooked-as-hell) "green party" is currently in power).
Once another party takes over, the nukes will likely be fired up. Taiwan can make all the power it needs.
adw
14 hours ago
Blue and Green in Taiwan do not relate to environmentalism, they relate to the position of the party with respect to the mainland.
topspin
14 hours ago
Setting aside the "blue green" matter, the question remains: what exactly are the "political reasons" at play here. That phrase raises my suspicions. Which party, what is their alignment and what is their problem with nuclear power?
kenhwang
14 hours ago
Green is the independent Taiwan/nationalist party. Blue is the anti-war/friendliness with China party.
The anti-nuclear sentiment is more due to the age/state of the reactors and concerns over earthquake safety after the Fukushima nuclear accident and the inability for the island to store/handle/dispose of waste.
I don't think the state of nuclear power will change much even if the blues gain power. Taiwanese politics has a way of making the minority party always be against the status quo for some issues just to be a pain for the majority party, and their stance on nuclear power tends to flip flop depending on who's in power.
jncfhnb
13 hours ago
“Anti war/friendliness with China” is a very nice way of saying it’s the “let China seize control of the country” party.
teractiveodular
12 hours ago
It's nowhere near that straightforward. The party in question is the Kuomintang (KMT), who fought against the CCP in the civil war and founded the Taiwanese state. However, their position matches the PRC's in that there is "one China", and they assert that the Green/independence movement will break the status quo and basically force the PRC to invade.
jncfhnb
11 hours ago
The PRC is not forced to invade. That’s obvious bullshit
teractiveodular
9 hours ago
The PRC has repeatedly stated that a declaration of independence by Taiwan would amount to an act of war and they would be "forced" to invade to stop it. Obviously the forcing is in quotes, because it's just the PRC forcing itself, but the PRC has painted itself into a corner here and nobody has dared to call their bluff yet.
maeil
3 hours ago
The PRC is very well known for "repeatedly stating things" [1]. Finally, after decades, the West has started to catch on to this.
teractiveodular
3 hours ago
Sure, they may be bluffing, but we don't know since Taiwan has not actually declared independence.
What is certain that if they do, and the PRC blinks (does not invade), the PRC's government will suffer from massive loss of face.
roenxi
12 hours ago
[flagged]
nitwit005
12 hours ago
If the bigger country always won, the world would be one giant stable empire ruling over everyone for the last ten thousand years.
Ukraine is fighting Russia without other nation's armies directly joining them. Taiwan's allies have most of the globe's naval power.
roenxi
5 hours ago
It isn't a question of whether China would win, it is the certainty that Taiwan would lose. And regardless, that isn't the reason why large empires are unstable. Through history big countries tend to win but large agglomerations tend to dissolve for economic concerns. That is what happened in the largest imperial dissolutions in history (British, Mongols) which weren't because of a defeat by an external power or because they had any trouble conquering small powers. Or the most recent with things like the USSR.
Large empires tend to lose through military victories and bad economic strategy.
blibble
12 hours ago
> How do you see the future playing out where China doesn't get to do what it likes to Taiwan?
if Taiwan carried out its former plan of using nuclear power stations to build the bomb it wouldn't have to worry about China again (or fickle US support)
AnimalMuppet
12 hours ago
I take it you're not a fan of the expression "Live free or die". But not everyone agrees with you. Some understand why "liberty or death" is actually a reasonable way to live and die - that liberty is in fact worth fighting and dying for. Because if you're not willing to fight for liberty, sooner or later someone will make you either fight or become a slave, and if you won't fight, slavery is all that's left.
As for the actual practical situation: Sailing enough troops to conquer Taiwan across 90 miles of ocean, to land on a very small number of workable beaches, that have been known to be the only workable beaches for decades and therefore have highly prepared defenses... yeah, that's not something that China is guaranteed success at. Xi has looked at what happened to Russia, and may be less certain of Taiwan rolling over, and less certain of success.
So no, it's not inevitable. Stop counseling despair.
roenxi
5 hours ago
> Some understand why "liberty or death" is actually a reasonable way to live and die
If there is a choice, sure. If there isn't a choice, then living is also a good option. Losing liberty isn't a reason to commit suicide.
> Stop counseling despair.
What despair? Why would Taiwan have to despair? China already controls something like 10% of the human race, the 10% that has seen the biggest improvement in living standards over the last 50 years.
Signing up with that would be unpleasant. But it seems like a better option than a war with the world's greatest industrial superpower that Taiwan is quite likely to lose. We've had a bunch of countries choose war with the US and they'd almost uniformly have been better off surrendering and arguing for liberty in a diplomatic way.
winter_blue
9 hours ago
With regards to “live free or die”, I’d say it only makes sense if the enemy want to genocide you. Like in the case of the Nazis, I would say fighting them is best (if you’re not “aryan”), since they’d murder you anyways.
But you have to be intelligent about it in other circumstances, and consider whether it’s actually worth throwing your life away, if the enemy isn’t genoicidally murderous like the Germans under the Nazi party.
Consider African Americans under Jim Crow laws — should they have fought violently? That only would have led to them murdered, even potentially in large numbers. African Americans have survived in the U.S. and not been mass murdered partially due to not fighting (and also by moving to more hospitable areas during the Great Migration).
To quote https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...:
>It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle. He thought about fighting. “Just be quiet,” his father told him. “Because they’ll come and kill us all.”
Basically don’t fight the enemy that’s enslaving you, unless you’re strong enough to win; otherwise you endanger suffering ethnic cleansing / genocide of your people.
tsudounym
14 hours ago
It really makes sense for the DPP (Green) to be anti-nuclear. Mainland China is using Westinghouse AP1000 designs from the US for their nuke plants. Taiwan is friendlier with the US and can get a nice discount to license the same AP1000..
alephnerd
13 hours ago
The DPP isn't anti-nuclear for strategic reasons - it's anti-nuclear for ideological reasons.
The nuclear program in Taiwan was heavily tied to the KMT's ambitions, and as a result Taiwan's anti-nuclear movement is heavily tied to Taiwan's pro-democracy movement which became the DPP, along with the MASSIVE beating nuclear power took all over Asia after the Fukushima disaster (which imo was overhyped in Chinese language media).
Politically speaking, Taiwan under authoritarian KMT rule was in a fairly similar spot to China today, and most of the significant gains that Taiwan saw happened after Taiwan democratized.
That said, anti-nuclear sentiment is equally strong in Mainland China as well, and aside from flashy tech demonstrations, the PRC prefers to use a mix of more politically palatable coal and renewables.
Finally, it is the 1980s-90s generation that is currently in power in Taiwan, and has been for a decade now. Anti-nuclear sentiment will remain for the foreseeable future [0]
lepus
14 hours ago
One of those "purely political reasons" being the obvious and real risks involved with having nuclear power plants in an area known for large earthquakes which was made especially real in people's minds after Fukushima ( further down in the same page you linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Taiwan#Post-F... )
derlvative
14 hours ago
Are there any risks that are real and not just in people's minds?
alephnerd
13 hours ago
A significant portion of Taiwan grew up during authoritarian rule, and the anti-nuclear movement was heavily tied to the democracy movement of the 1980s-90s - especially because CKS tied his own ambitions to nuclear capacity - both for energy and potentially weapons.
It's very difficult to separate the two given that the 80s-90s generation is in power in Taiwan.
derlvative
11 hours ago
That's a long way of saying that it's just inside people's heads.
alephnerd
10 hours ago
And that's a long way to say that you don't care about people's experiences.
jay_kyburz
12 hours ago
Was Fukushima real or just in people's minds?
sofixa
4 hours ago
What was real was that a bad design that the company operating the plant was warned about repeatedly, survived an earthquake, but didn't survive a tsunami. As a result, there was an evacuation. And nobody died from anything directly related to the power plant itself, only due to the evacuation. Multiple times more people died in an oil tank fire in another city due to the same earthquake+tsunami. And during its lifetime Fukushima saved countless lives by not emitting air pollution.
On the "generating reliable power for a country" scale, everything is a tradeoff. There is no perfect solution that just works with no downside, especially in geographically challenged countries such as Japan.
PoignardAzur
12 hours ago
Fukushima was perfectly fine after the earthquake. The tsunami is what provoked the accident by knocking out the backup generators.
This is not a scenario most plants are remotely vulnerable to. It's reasonable to ask if peoples' worries about a Fukushima repeat are grounded in reality.
jay_kyburz
12 hours ago
Fukushima is simply a good example of how dangerous and expensive nuclear can be when unknown unknowns rear their head.
There are countless black swan events that are exacerbated by having nuclear around.
NoMoreNicksLeft
11 hours ago
Could firing those up be mistaken for hostile intentions? The desire to enrich uranium (or harvest plutonium) for a nuclear program?
unglaublich
14 hours ago
It's the same in Europe. Oil lobbyists infiltrated the gullible greens and convinced them that gas and oil are better than nuclear.
JumpCrisscross
14 hours ago
> Oil lobbyists infiltrated the gullible greens and convinced them that gas and oil are better than nuclear
It’s actually the gas lobbyists. They push an all renewables-no-nukes agenda. Which works in theory. But in practice, there aren’t enough panels and batteries being produced. So the gap is filled with gas.
The promise is that infrastructure will be phased out. But Europe has already invested over €1.5tn into new gas infrastructure. Those are 1.5tn reasons not to decommission it. We had a choice between nukes and gas, and the gas lobby convinced us it was a fight between coal (already on its deathbed) and solar panels.
foobarian
12 hours ago
When you say “tn” do you mean the European trillion or the American one? I.e 10^15 or 10^12
seper8
13 hours ago
Actually exactly the opposite.
Green parties convinced people wind and solar would suffice. Now the net can't deal with the peaks and throughs. Here in the NL already one of our biggest tech companies is not opening a new datacenter because of lack of electricity available. We used to laugh at countries not having enough power...
maeil
3 hours ago
Unbelievable that you're saying this when the last 14 years have seen the same party in power, who throughout that entire period have ran on a platform with little in common with "the greens". It's like as if the Reps had been in power for 14 years straight in the US, and you'd still find a way to blame the Dems for a nation-level issue.
Might've wanted to consider upgrading the grid during those 14 years. Not like the need for an energy transition hasn't been known for decades.