Taiwan’s nuclear power plant closures, a KMT political tactic against the DPP, are also a strategic move considering China’s plan to attack them in wartime.
The recent closure of Taiwan’s last functioning nuclear plant, Ma-anshan, located at the southern end of the island, has triggered a wave of angry, uninformed commentary, some of it obviously intended as anti-Taiwan propaganda. “Taiwan’s energy missteps are no longer a domestic debate but a strategic liability for US defense planning,” read a recent headline in The National Interest. Brandon Weichert, a regular contributor to The National Interest, claimed that Taiwan had shot itself in the foot. On X and Bluesky, there were numerous comments from otherwise intelligent commentators stating that Taiwan was “dumb” or “stupid” for shutting down the plants.
Nuclear Plants Are a Wartime Liability
Much of the plant closure “discourse”—if so elevated a term may be used for such ignorant, slanted verbiage—contends that Taiwan would need the nuclear power plants in the event of war or blockade to supply power. This is a myth. In reality, should the People’s Republic of China (PRC) attack Taiwan, they already have plans to hit any operating nuclear reactors. As PRC military expert Ian Easton observed in a 2021 Taipei Times piece, a 2014 internal memo generated by the Nanjing Army Command Academy observes that heavy weaponry cannot be used on Taiwan’s nuclear power plants. “Instead, the manual argues helicopter gunships armed with anti-tank missiles should be given the mission of hitting them,” Easton describes. It should be noted that the PRC now possesses an abundance of far more precise munitions to carry out that task (tempting them even more strongly to actually do it). Moreover, if they fail to shut down the plants with the first attack, they will attack them again and again until they do, increasing the risk that operator control is lost. Other military manuals, Easton notes, discuss how a radiological disaster should be handled by invading troops, implying that PRC planners believe it is possible for the plants to melt down during an invasion.
A Prime Target
In a blockade, PRC military planners plan to bombard the island’s power plants and destroy its electrical grid (and many of its other facilities). Nuclear plants will not be spared. Indeed, in the blockade practice this April, the PRC said it had practiced hitting “simulated targets of key ports and energy facilities.” Note that in Ukraine, the Russians, apparently accidentally, punched a hole in the sarcophagus at Chernobyl with a drone. Of course, the second nuclear plant in Taiwan sits right on an invasion beach. Accidents will happen.
Taiwan’s nuclear power plants are also perfect targets for blackmail. The threat of attacks on nuclear power plants could force evacuations, complicated in wartime. In tiny Taiwan, where would those people go? Never mind the possibility of sabotage by insiders who support a PRC takeover of Taiwan.
In sum, Taiwan’s nuclear power plants must be closed because, during wartime, either by blockade or invasion, they will become targets, headaches for both grid and defense planners, with the lurking possibility of radiological disaster.
The fact that the PRC plans to attack the reactors is generally met with two expressions of skepticism. First, people contend that “the Chinese would never bomb nuclear plants.” This is merely an argument from incredulity. Anyone who has ever interacted with PRC netizens has heard the common Chinese refrain that encapsulates PRC hatred of the people of Taiwan: “Leave the land, exterminate the people” (liu dao bu liu ren). They are already planning for mass death tolls from strikes on the grid, transportation, government facilities, ports, and so forth. Clearly, they simply don’t care what damage they do, as long as they win.
Nor is the PRC an outlier in this. Nuclear plants have already been attacked. The Iranians hit the unfinished Iraqi reactor despite fearing it had already been fueled. Like the PRC planners above, the Iranian attack focused on the control room and other facilities and avoided hitting the reactor dome (it was later destroyed by the Israelis). Russia has repeatedly carried out military actions in and around the major reactor complex at Zaporizhzhia. In April of 2024, the plant was hit by a drone attack that focused on surveillance and communication equipment. Despite this focus, reactor containment structures took three direct hits.
Another argument often heard is that the PRC wouldn’t cause a radiological disaster because it might affect China. Again, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership has created massive famines, pushed rapid industrialization at the expense of the environment and workers, implemented slave labor programs, polluted nearly all the major water sources in the PRC, and even welded up COVID victims in their own homes. In general, the CCP exhibits indifference to the health and safety of its citizens, especially when the CCP’s own control or major goals are threatened. As noted above, PRC war planners call for the invasion to go on regardless of nuclear plant meltdowns. Obviously, the threat of radiological disaster is no deterrent.
Taiwan’s Fossil Fuel Reliance
A second strain of criticism focuses on Taiwan’s increased dependence on imported fossil fuels, which now supply over 90 percent of Taiwan’s energy, with the closure of the last nuclear plant. This is wrong in two ways. First, that is truly not a criticism of the closure of nuclear plants but rather of Taiwan’s slow implementation of a broad renewables strategy, an issue where blame is shared among all actors. Second, as an excellent piece at the University of Nottingham’s Taiwan Insight observed last month, the problem of fossil fuel dependence is a myth. In a blockade scenario, energy demand would collapse by as much as half as industrial exports halt. “Under these conditions,” authors Yun-Ling Ko and Chia-Wei Chao contend, “Taiwan’s existing coal-fired power plants, combined with a growing portfolio of renewable energy, could sustain the island’s electricity needs for over a year.”
The Myth of DPP Sole Responsibility
The third myth associated with Taiwan’s nuclear power program is that the responsibility for closing the plants lies with the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) “Nuclear-Free Homeland” policy. This is actually a complicated half-truth. The DPP does indeed want nuclear power eliminated from Taiwan’s energy mix. The Beijing-aligned “opposition” parties, the Kuomintang (KMT) and its ally in the legislature, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), constantly attack the DPP for this policy.
If one ignores KMT pro-nuclear noises, it is very easy to see how the KMT forced the nuclear plants to close. In the north, both nuclear plants sit in New Taipei City, which has been controlled by the KMT for over a decade. It has been known for years that the two northern plants would have to close around 2020, having reached the end of their lives, their spent fuel pools full. Ma-anshan has long been scheduled for closure in 2025. Their lives, however, could be extended if storage for their spent fuel were constructed.
KMT Actions Contradict Its Rhetoric
Reality is very different from the party’s vocal support for nuclear power. For 11 years, successive KMT mayors blocked the construction of storage sites in New Taipei City. The city even sued the power company multiple times for trying to locate a site. Finally, in 2024, long after the plants had been safely closed, the city signed an agreement for the construction of spent fuel storage. Strip away the rhetoric, and the conclusion is obvious: the KMT wanted the plants closed.
Now that the last nuclear plant is safely closed, the KMT is demanding a referendum on reopening it (KMT demands for referendums on nuclear power are performatively habitual after plant closures). Officials testified in legislative questioning that it is unlikely a site for storing spent fuel from Ma-anshan can be identified before the current 2028 deadline. After that, many more years will pass for permitting, construction, and removing and storing the fuel.
Finally, as other officials noted in legislative questioning, Taiwan has no legal framework for reopening the nuclear plants. Given the foregoing, the proposed referendum is entirely meaningless.
Focus Must Be on Real Energy Priorities
Thus, one of the ironies of Kevin Ting-Chen Sun’s claims that “Taiwan’s energy missteps are a growing liability for the US” is that Sun is a senior KMT legislative staffer. Sun argues that “the first step to reverse the deterioration is to keep Taiwan’s existing, operational nuclear reactors running through safety checks and upgrades.” That is not wrong.
Yet, at present, and for all but eight years since the island constructed its first nuclear power plants in the 1970s, the legislature has been controlled by Sun’s party, the KMT. There is, and has been, nothing to stop Sun’s party from establishing legal frameworks to hasten spent fuel storage permitting and construction and re-open closed nuclear plants. It has not. Sun spoke truly when he said, “Taiwanese leaders have failed to commit to expanding facilities and institutionalizing transparent consultation.” His party, ostensibly committed to nuclear power, has been at the forefront of that failure.
The necessity of closing the plants as their spent fuel pools filled up and the reactors reached the end of their lifespans has been known for years. Yet, the KMT and its supporters waited until the plants were safely closed and only then began calls for referendums and reopening. In this case, KMT inaction speaks louder than words: it appears that the KMT political strategy is to ensure the nuclear plants are closed and done so in a way that enables it to attack the DPP.
Recall, too, that a KMT Administration terminated construction of the island’s Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in 2015. Yet it controlled the legislature during the entirety of the plant’s construction and could have made it a showcase for nuclear power in Taiwan.
Why, then, does the KMT constantly keep nuclear power front and center in the news? If the media and government officials are discussing the pointless question of whether Taiwan’s ancient, obsolete nuclear power plants should be closed, they are not taking action on things Taiwan urgently needs: grid decentralization, defense, stockpiling, and hardening, power source diversification and development of robust off-grid sourcing, and the organization and training of a massive reserve of power workers for when the grid is hit.
Nuclear power in Taiwan is not salvation but a distraction. It’s that simple.
About the Author: Michael A. Turton
Michael Turton is a columnist for the Taipei Times who has written extensively on Taiwan’s security, local politics, nuclear power, history, and culture.
Image: Uwe Aranas/Shutterstock
