Taiwan's Climate Crisis and Net-Zero Transition: On the Day the Maanshan Nuclear Plant Referendum Failed, the Choices Imposed by Physical Limits Had Only Just Begun

30-second overview: On the evening of August 23, 2025, votes were counted in the referendum on extending the Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant: 4.34 million yes votes, 74% in favor, turnout of 29.53%, falling 650,000 votes short of the threshold. The next day, Lai Ching-te announced three principles: "no nuclear safety concerns, a solution for nuclear waste, and social consensus." Seven months later, on March 27, 2026, Taipower submitted an application to the Nuclear Safety Commission to restart Maanshan, with restart possible as early as 2028¹². The referendum failed, yet Taipower is moving back toward nuclear power. This is the deepest contradiction of an island that depends on imports for 98% of its energy and has promised to invest NT$9 trillion to reach net zero by 2050³. The government's geothermal target is 200 MW by 2030; actual commercial operation by the end of 2025 was only 7.4 MW, a 27-fold gap. The Lanyu storage facility opened in 1982 and holds 97,672 barrels of nuclear waste; the relocation deadline has been missed four times⁴⁵. The energy question is a question of physical limits.

The Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant in Hengchun, Pingtung, on the Nanwan coastline. Unit 1 was shut down on January 1, 2025; Unit 2 was shut down on May 17. Image: M. Weitzel, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Day of the Maanshan Referendum

On the evening of August 23, 2025, votes were counted across Taiwan's 22 counties and cities, and the result of the referendum on extending the Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant was announced: 4,342,206 votes in favor, 1,511,693 votes against, and 74.17% support. But turnout was only 29.53%. Under the Referendum Act, yes votes had to reach one quarter of all eligible voters, or 5,000,523 votes; the yes side fell short by 658,317 votes¹. More than twice as many people supported the proposal as opposed it, yet the referendum failed.

📝 Curator's note: The common reading is "74% support = public opinion clearly supports nuclear power," but this reverses the causality. The design of the Referendum Act was never simply about which side had more votes. It requires a mobilization threshold to prove that "enough people care" about an issue. A turnout rate of 29.53% means more than 70% of voters chose not to go to the polls. This is a more awkward third signal: many people did not feel strongly enough about the energy question to walk into a polling station.

Two days later, on August 25, President Lai Ching-te held a press conference and gave his response: to restart nuclear power, three gates had to be passed: "no nuclear safety concerns, a solution for nuclear waste, and social consensus"². It sounded reasonable, but each condition is a problem that has remained unsolved for 50 years.

Then came March 27, 2026. Taipower submitted its application plan for restarting Maanshan to the Nuclear Safety Commission, initiating the safety inspection process after the shutdown of Maanshan Unit 1. The safety inspection is expected to take about 18 months, with restart possible as early as 2028¹. This is a return.

From the vote count to submission for review, exactly seven months passed. Nothing changed in between: nuclear waste is still on Lanyu, the final repository has still not been sited, and social consensus remains divided. But the administrative process moved. This is the question this article seeks to answer: when a democratic vote rejects something while the executive branch advances it at the same time, who is actually deciding Taiwan's energy policy?

Lanyu, 1982 to 2057

To understand the story of Maanshan, one must first understand the story of Lanyu.

In 1982, Taipower opened a low-level radioactive waste storage facility on the coastline south of Longmen, Lanyu. At the time, Tao residents were told it was a "fish cannery," a claim that later became one of the most frequently cited cases of deception in Taiwan's history of environmental justice⁶. In 1988, Tao people launched their first large-scale protest, using the traditional ritual of "driving out evil spirits" to express their rejection of nuclear waste. It marked the beginning of Taiwan's Indigenous environmental movement.

Over the next 38 years, relocation promises were broken four times: in 1996, the government promised relocation by 2002, then missed the deadline in 2002; it then missed further deadlines in 2016, 2019, and 2023. As of 2024, the Lanyu storage facility held a cumulative 97,672 barrels of low-level radioactive waste. The Atomic Energy Council required Taipower to complete relocation by 2029, but the destination remains undecided⁴.

If the 2029 deadline is missed again, as the industry widely expects, Lanyu's nuclear waste will have been stored there from 1982 until 2057, a total of 75 years. An outlying island of 4,000 people will have borne the by-products of four nuclear power plants for longer than the lifespan of most people in Taiwan.

⚠️ Contested view: Nuclear-power advocates often say that "nuclear waste is technically solvable; the obstacle is only political." But the problem of nuclear waste has always been the dimension of time. Lanyu has already lived with it for 44 years since 1982, and promises have never been fulfilled. In the most optimistic scenario, it can be moved out in 2029. But what happens after "moving it out of Lanyu"? The siting of a final repository remains stuck, and local resistance in Daren Township, Taitung County, is still unresolved. Technically feasible ≠ politically feasible ≠ ethically feasible. Lanyu is where the gap among these three levels becomes concrete.

PanSci reported that nuclear fuel rods remain hot and highly radioactive after reactor decommissioning and must be cooled in on-site fuel pools for at least five years before they have any chance of being moved out. Meanwhile, land-use issues for dry storage facilities at the Jinshan and Guosheng nuclear plants have been stalled for more than 11 years. The New Taipei City government has refused to approve dry storage facilities, meaning spent fuel rods are still stored in on-site fuel pools and have already exceeded original design capacity⁷⁸. "The biggest obstacle to extending nuclear power is where to put spent nuclear fuel." This sentence, cited by PanSci as an industry consensus, is the most awkward background sound to the application to restart Maanshan⁸.

The Physical Limits of Nuclear Waste

Shift the camera to Olkiluoto Island in southern Finland.

Five hundred meters underground, inside a granite layer, a tunnel five kilometers long has been excavated. At the end of that tunnel is Onkalo, humanity's first high-level radioactive nuclear waste final repository to formally receive a trial operation permit. In August 2024, Finland's nuclear safety regulator, STUK, issued the permit. The project has been planned since the 1970s and has taken nearly half a century⁹.

Entrance to Finland's Onkalo high-level radioactive nuclear waste final repository, 500 meters underground in granite, granted a trial operation permit in 2024. Image: kallerna, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Onkalo is designed to isolate nuclear waste for more than 100,000 years. How absurd is that timescale? Human civilization is roughly 10,000 years old. The oldest pyramids are 4,500 years old. One hundred thousand years ago, our ancestors had not yet left Africa¹⁰.

💡 Did you know? A final nuclear waste repository must isolate waste for so long that it reaches "the end of human memory." Onkalo's design team spent years discussing one question: how can people 100,000 years in the future be told "do not dig here"? By then, no existing language, symbol, government, or religion will remain. The final plan uses a nuclear waste warning symbol and warnings in multiple languages, but designers acknowledge that this is only "a message for the next 1,000 years." No one knows what to do after 1,000 years.

What about Taiwan's final repository? The candidate site for the final repository for low-level nuclear waste is Daren Township, Taitung County, but the siting process is trapped by local political resistance¹¹. The siting process for a final repository for high-level nuclear waste has not even begun. Finland spent 50 years to reach trial operation. Taiwan has spent zero years.

PanSci's report also mentioned another "physical-limit solution" that was once seriously discussed: disposing of nuclear waste in space. "The idea of disposing of nuclear waste in space is physically feasible, but it would require an extremely stable and reliable rocket; otherwise, if a launch failed, the radioactive contamination caused on Earth would be difficult to estimate"¹². The SpaceX Falcon 9 has a failure rate of about 1%, meaning that once every 100 launches, high-level radioactive nuclear waste could be blown into the atmosphere. Physically feasible, and also physically infeasible.

This is the physical limit behind the four words "a solution for nuclear waste." Its timescale is longer than all of human civilization.

The Hydrogen Rainbow: Green, Blue, Gray, White and Gold

If nuclear power is too heavy, can Taiwan go around it?

Over the past five years, hydrogen has been seen as the next wave in the energy transition. The problem is that hydrogen itself is an energy carrier, not an energy source. Other energy must first be used to "make" hydrogen, which is then used to generate electricity or serve as fuel. Where it comes from determines whether it is truly "clean."

PanSci classifies hydrogen by production method into different colors: "Hydrogen color codes correspond to different production methods: gray hydrogen (natural gas SMR, emits CO₂), blue hydrogen (gray hydrogen + CCS), green hydrogen (water electrolysis using renewable electricity), blue-green hydrogen (methane pyrolysis, solid carbon without CO₂ emissions). From a carbon-emissions perspective, green hydrogen is ideal, but it has the highest cost"¹³.

Hydrogen color	Production method	Carbon emissions	Cost	Taiwan's current status
Gray hydrogen	Steam methane reforming (SMR)	High (emits CO₂)	Low	Most commonly used in industry
Blue hydrogen	Gray hydrogen + carbon capture and storage (CCS)	Medium (lower after CCS)	Medium-high	No commercial operation
Green hydrogen	Water electrolysis using renewable electricity	Zero	High	Planned by CPC
Blue-green hydrogen	Methane pyrolysis (decarbonized hydrogen combustion)	Zero (produces solid carbon)	Medium	Trial at Hsinta Power Plant
White hydrogen / gold hydrogen	Naturally formed underground	Zero (no manufacturing required)	Pending exploration	None

Taiwan's hydrogen testing site is Hsinta Power Plant in Kaohsiung. Taipower is cooperating with Academia Sinica to test "decarbonized hydrogen combustion": decomposing natural gas, or methane, into hydrogen and solid carbon at high temperatures. The process produces no carbon dioxide, and the solid carbon can be used as an industrial feedstock¹³. The appeal of this technology is that it can continue using existing natural gas infrastructure without rebuilding the entire energy system from scratch.

But hydrogen has its own physical limits. "Although hydrogen is clean energy, its effect as a greenhouse gas is 11.6 times that of carbon dioxide (GWP100); if it leaks during production, transport, or use, it may instead worsen warming"¹⁴. A hydrogen molecule is the smallest molecule in the universe, and leakage rates are naturally high. This is a physical limit in materials science, not something engineering effort can completely overcome.

There are also newer players: white hydrogen / gold hydrogen. A 2023 study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that natural hydrogen formed underground through crustal movement could amount to "tens of billions of tons," enough to supply humanity's energy needs for several hundred years¹⁴¹⁵. France and Mali already have commercial exploration. Taiwan sits on an active plate boundary and, in theory, has potential, but there is currently no exploration plan. It is the energy option furthest from theory.

📝 Curator's note: The core point readers should remember from hydrogen's rainbow classification is that behind the term "clean energy," one must always ask, "Where does the energy come from?" Green hydrogen becomes economical only when renewable electricity is so abundant that there is nowhere to sell it. Taiwan has not reached that situation. Until then, hydrogen is in fact another showroom for fossil fuels.

Geothermal Taiwan: 33 GW of Potential vs 7.4 MW in Reality

If hydrogen is a "contest over carriers," geothermal energy is a "contest over depth."

Taiwan should have been a geothermal power. Located at the junction of the Eurasian Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate, the island has volcanoes, hot springs, and seismic belts that form a natural geothermal resource base. In 1981, a 3 MW pilot unit was built at Qingshui Geothermal in Yilan, Taiwan's first geothermal power plant. But because of technical problems such as downhole scaling and acid corrosion, it shut down in 1993.

For the next 30 years, geothermal energy fell silent in Taiwan. It was not until 2020, when the privately invested 4.2 MW Qingshui Geothermal unit resumed commercial operation, that geothermal energy returned to public debate. In 2024, the 5.4 MW Tuchang geothermal project in Yilan began construction and is expected to start in early 2026. By the end of 2025, Taiwan's total commercial geothermal capacity was 7.4 MW¹⁶.

What are the government's official targets? 200 MW by 2030, and 6 GW, or 6,000 MW, by 2050. From 7.4 MW to 200 MW is a 27-fold gap; to 6 GW is an 810-fold gap. Those are the timelines for the next five and 25 years.

PanSci, citing National Taiwan University research, notes: "Taiwan's geothermal resources are widely distributed. According to National Taiwan University research, the potential generation capacity of deep geothermal energy (below five kilometers) is as high as 33,640 MW, equivalent to about 12 Fourth Nuclear Power Plants"¹⁷. But this is only a theoretical value. Developing deep geothermal energy requires EGS, or Enhanced Geothermal System, technology: drilling several kilometers underground and artificially injecting water to create heat-exchange layers. Globally, there are only a few demonstration projects, and the technology has not yet been commercialized.

Meanwhile, "Taiwan's shallow geothermal development potential (within three kilometers of depth) is estimated at no more than 1,000 MW, and several experimental projects are currently underway at Qingshui in Yilan and Datun Mountain in Taipei"¹⁷. Even if shallow geothermal resources were fully developed, they would provide only about 3% of Taiwan's total electricity demand.

The advantage of geothermal energy is stability. "The advantage of geothermal energy is that, unlike wind or solar power, it is not affected by weather. It is a baseload source that can generate electricity steadily 24 hours a day, giving it unique value in the energy mix"¹⁸. There are not many renewable energy sources that can replace nuclear power's baseload function. Geothermal is one of them, provided it can actually be built.

⚠️ Contested view: The slow development of geothermal energy in Taiwan is often attributed to "immature technology." But PanSci's interviews with industry produced a different conclusion: the real bottleneck is underground uncertainty + difficulty obtaining loans. Before a geothermal well is drilled, no one can guarantee that it will produce water, how hot it will be, or how long it will last. Banks will not lend, and developers are afraid to invest. Japan and New Zealand have similar difficulties, but both have government-guided funds that share the risk. Taiwan's geothermal developers can currently use only the financing model for solar photovoltaics: once solar panels are installed, they generate electricity; geothermal wells do not. Copying the financing structure guarantees a bottleneck.

Marine Energy: The Kuroshio's 9.4 GW Is Still in the Trial Stage

After the underground comes the ocean.

The Kuroshio off eastern Taiwan is one of the strongest ocean currents in the world. It flows north year-round at 1.5 to 2.5 meters per second and is about 100 kilometers wide. In theory, it is an endless energy river. In 2021, Academia Sinica completed offshore testing of a 100 kW experimental unit, a milestone in Taiwan's development of marine energy¹⁹.

PanSci cites Academia Sinica's estimate: "The renewable energy potential of the waters around Taiwan is enormous. Marine energy, including ocean-current energy, wave energy, and ocean thermal energy, has an estimated theoretical potential of 9.4 GW. The Kuroshio passes Taiwan's east coast and is the most promising source of ocean-current energy"¹⁹.

Another direction is OTEC, or ocean thermal energy conversion: using the temperature difference between warm surface water, 25 to 28°C, and cold deep water, 5°C, to drive generators. The steep depth gradient off eastern Taiwan is considered ideal for OTEC. "The waters off eastern Taiwan have a large depth gradient and are theoretically ideal for developing OTEC, but the technology is still in the experimental stage"²⁰.

But marine energy hits physical limits even earlier than geothermal energy: the durability of ocean engineering. Typhoons, salt corrosion, biofouling, and deepwater maintenance are each century-scale engineering challenges. Internationally, there is still no commercial OTEC power plant in operation. The leading global example of Kuroshio-type current generation is a 100 kW demonstration in Okinawa, Japan. Taiwan's 100 kW trial is only the starting point. From here to commercialization, international experience suggests it will take 15 to 20 years.

Fourth-Generation Nuclear SMR: Bill Gates's Wager

If Taiwan returns to nuclear power, will fourth-generation nuclear energy be the answer?

PanSci reports: "The biggest difference between a Natrium reactor and a traditional nuclear power plant lies in its coolant. Traditional nuclear reactors use water as coolant, while Natrium uses liquid metallic sodium. Sodium has a high boiling point and can operate at higher temperatures, improving reactor efficiency; sodium's thermal conductivity is 100 times that of water"²¹.

This is the sodium-cooled fast reactor promoted by TerraPower, the company founded by Bill Gates. In April 2026, TerraPower's Natrium project officially broke ground in Kemmerer, Wyoming, and is expected to be completed in 2030²², one year later than originally scheduled, but still a critical milestone for the commercialization of fourth-generation nuclear power.

The selling point of fourth-generation nuclear power is the "small modular reactor," or SMR: instead of traditional 1,000 MW-scale generation capacity, it is reduced to 100 to 300 MW, can be prefabricated in factories and assembled on site, and in theory can lower costs and shorten construction time.

But physical limits remain. PanSci identifies two key risks:

"Fast neutron reactors require high-concentration uranium fuel, and breeding reactions produce plutonium-239, an important material for making nuclear weapons. Therefore, how to manage nuclear materials and prevent nuclear proliferation becomes a difficult problem that fast neutron reactors must face"²³.

"The construction of the Natrium reactor marks a major advance in fourth-generation nuclear power technology, yet its development also comes with major challenges"²⁴. Liquid sodium reacts violently with water and is flammable. Reactor operation and maintenance impose extremely high requirements on materials science, and there is still no safety data from large-scale commercial operation.

Does Taiwan have an SMR plan? At present, there is no official plan of any kind. Even if evaluation began now, international experience suggests that siting, environmental impact assessment, safety review, and commercial operation would take 15 to 20 years. In other words, fourth-generation nuclear power is not the answer to 2050 net zero; even in the most optimistic scenario, it would not come online until 2045 to 2050.

📝 Curator's note: In international public discourse, fourth-generation nuclear power is often treated as "the nuclear power of the future," and therefore turned into "a good reason to delay the current energy transition": if better technology will arrive in 15 years, why rush now? This is the most dangerous confusion in the question of physical limits. The engineering bottleneck for renewable energy is that "not enough has been built yet"; the bottleneck for fourth-generation nuclear power is that "safety and nonproliferation data from commercial operation have not yet accumulated enough." The two timelines cannot substitute for each other. If Taiwan misses the renewable energy construction window before 2030, SMRs in 2045 will not save the climate ledger.

Offshore Wind: The Piece of the Puzzle Where Taiwan Leads Asia

Shift the camera back to what has already happened.

Formosa 1 offshore wind farm off Miaoli, which began commercial operation in 2019 and was Taiwan's first large-scale offshore wind farm. Image: Ministry of Economic Affairs, Republic of China, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons

The Taiwan Strait is one of the best wind fields in the world. "Because of topographic factors, the Taiwan Strait forms a 'channeling effect,' making wind speeds in the strait much higher than in surrounding waters and turning Taiwan into one of the world's most promising locations for offshore wind development"²⁵. In winter, the northeast monsoon is squeezed into the strait by the Central Mountain Range and the hills of Fujian, producing average wind speeds of 10 to 12 meters per second. This geographic fact has made offshore wind the central wager of the energy transition.

From almost zero in 2016 to about 4.5 GW of cumulative installed capacity by March 2026³, Taiwan's offshore wind expansion has been among the fastest in Asia. Denmark's Ørsted completed the 920 MW Greater Changhua 2b and 4 offshore wind farms off Changhua²⁶. The third phase of zonal development, launched in 2026, allocated 3.6 GW in this round, targeting completion and grid connection in 2030 to 2031³.

The government's blueprint is even larger: 13 GW of offshore wind by 2030, and a challenge target of 55 GW by 2050.

But offshore turbines bring not only electricity, but conflict. In February 2022, more than 100 Changhua fishers went north to protest at the Executive Yuan, accusing the government of "destroying fishers" for wind power²⁷. The navigation exclusion zones designated for offshore wind farms blocked the waters where they had worked for generations. In May 2025, a court ruled that navigation restrictions were illegal, the first time a Taiwan court challenged the spatial governance of offshore wind power²⁸.

Solar photovoltaics took another path. In 2024, installed solar PV capacity reached 14,281 MW, accounting for 68% of all renewable energy capacity, with generation of 14.9 billion kWh²⁹. Rooftop, ground-mounted, floating, and agrivoltaic installations have made solar the main force in renewable energy. But agrivoltaic policy has triggered criticism of "fake farming, real power generation," forcing the Ministry of Agriculture to strengthen inspections. On an island with only 790,000 hectares of arable land, the use of every plot is a political question.

Rooftop solar panels at Xihu Service Area. Taiwan's installed solar PV capacity reached 14,281 MW in 2024, accounting for 68% of renewable energy. Image: lienyuan lee, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Wind and solar are the fastest-moving pieces of Taiwan's energy transition, but they are intermittent by nature: when the sun sets, there is no solar power; when the wind stops, there is no wind power. This is also the argument nuclear advocates most often use in debates over extending Maanshan: "renewables are unstable and require baseload power." The question returns to the geothermal section: baseload renewable energy is not being built fast enough, and the 27-fold gap against the target is the political support for restarting Maanshan in 2028.

That Afternoon on May 13

At 2:37 p.m. on May 13, 2021, at the Lubei extra-high-voltage substation of Hsinta Power Plant in Kaohsiung, an operator opened switch No. 3541. He should have opened No. 3542³⁰.

This human error triggered a busbar grounding fault. Four generating units tripped, instantly removing 2.2 GW of generation capacity. From 3 p.m., Taiwan implemented six rounds of rolling power cuts by district, each lasting 50 minutes, affecting about four million households. To make matters worse, solar generation declined toward sunset, and drought had also reduced hydropower. It was not until coal-fired units came back online at 7 p.m. that power was fully restored at 8 p.m.

Four days later, on May 17, Hsinta Unit 1 failed again, bringing a second round of blackouts. Together, the two incidents affected more than 5.62 million households³⁰.

May 13 and May 17 exposed how fragile a power system in transition can be, far beyond the level of human error alone. The government's solution is energy storage: 1.5 GW of battery storage by 2025, expanding to 8.6 GW by 2030. But storage costs remain high, and the technology is still maturing.

This is the most honest face of the energy transition: the old system is no longer enough, and the new system is not ready. Whether the Maanshan extension referendum passed or failed could not change this reality; it could only delay or accelerate the moment of confronting it.

Giving Carbon a Price

On August 7, 2023, the Taiwan Carbon Solution Exchange was inaugurated in Kaohsiung's Asia New Bay Area, with initial paid-in capital of NT$1 billion and planned capital of NT$1.5 billion. Of that, the Taiwan Stock Exchange contributed NT$600 million and the National Development Fund contributed NT$400 million³¹. On December 22 of the same year, it completed its first batch of international carbon credit transactions: 45 companies purchased about 88,500 metric tons of CO₂-equivalent international carbon credits for more than US$800,000³¹.

In 2025, Taiwan's domestic carbon fee system officially took effect, marking the beginning of Taiwan's "first year of carbon pricing"³². Formosa Plastics listed its energy-efficiency improvement project at NT$3,000 per metric ton, while Hanbao Agriculture and Livestock priced its biogas power project at NT$3,000 to NT$4,000. But the market is still exploring: trading volume is low, and companies generally consider domestic carbon credit prices too high.

At the same time, technology giants such as TSMC and Foxconn have already rushed onto another battlefield. Under the RE100 initiative, these companies have pledged to use 100% renewable energy. TSMC plans to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. When international customers treat green electricity as a supply-chain threshold, green power supply becomes a matter of industrial survival, not merely an environmental issue.

After the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) enters its formal regime in 2026, it will raise the carbon costs and reporting pressure for high-carbon products exported to the EU, including steel, cement, aluminum, fertilizers, electricity, and hydrogen³³. Taiwan's manufacturing sector is dominated by energy-intensive industries. Steel, petrochemicals, cement, and papermaking together account for 60% of industrial emissions. This is another physical limit: the timetable set for Taiwan by the structure of international trade.

In his 2024 National Day address, Lai Ching-te announced the launch of a "second energy transition," covering three directions: diversified green energy, deep energy conservation, and advanced energy storage³⁴. But the renewable energy share in 2025 remained clearly below the original 20% target; depending on statistical definitions, it was around 12.7% to 13.1%³⁵. The Ministry of Economic Affairs has changed its language to estimate that 20% can be reached starting in November 2026, and about 30% by 2030.

Algal Reefs, the Tao, and Meinong: Fault Lines of Environmental Justice

Every energy pathway has its own opponents, and every opponent has its own history.

Taoyuan algal reefs. The 2021 "Cherish the Algal Reefs Referendum," Case No. 20, opposed Taipower's construction of a third liquefied natural gas receiving terminal on the Datan coast, in order to protect the world's largest columnar algal reef landform. The referendum failed, and a compromise plan for the third LNG terminal proceeded: shifting the port area outward and avoiding high-density algal reef zones. Algal reef scholars still considered the environmental impact assessment insufficient, but the EIA committee approved the review in 2023. The controversy has not subsided. This is the physical/ecological intersection of "natural gas must be built for carbon reduction, and algal reefs must be affected for natural gas."

The Tao people of Lanyu. From 1982 to 2026, 44 years of nuclear waste storage history constitute the longest-running wound in Taiwan's environmental justice. Tao people continued protesting missed relocation deadlines in 2024; in May of the same year, the Atomic Energy Council announced that it required Taipower to complete relocation by 2029. But where the waste will be moved remains unanswered⁴.

Meinong's anti-reservoir movement. The Meinong anti-reservoir movement of the 1990s mobilized resistance through the "Meinong Yellow Butterfly Festival" and "Hakka spirit," ultimately forcing the reservoir plan to retreat. It is a classic case of community-based environmental activism in Taiwan. Reading Meinong today reveals that its spirit still shapes other energy battlefields: whenever a wind turbine, solar panel, or transmission line enters a locality, it encounters the response, "We oppose bearing the costs of the transition ourselves; we do not oppose the energy transition itself."

📝 Curator's note: Conventional discussions of environmental justice often stop at "balancing development and environmental protection," but that framing flattens the problem. The real commonality among Lanyu, the algal reefs, and Meinong is this: they are all aftereffects of decisions made after the 1980s, paid for by social movements from the 1990s to the 2020s. Before 2050, the energy transition will produce many new "Lanyus" and "algal reefs" of its own: Changhua fishers in offshore wind, Indigenous communities in Yilan geothermal development, and Tainan salt fields in solar photovoltaics. The real question is whether Taiwan can avoid repeating the decision-making model of 1982.

For a detailed historical context of environmental justice, see History of Taiwan's Environmental Movement and Taiwan's Marine Pollution Governance and Conservation Challenges.

NT$9 Trillion and Physical Limits

Only when all energy sources are placed in the same table do the differences in physical limits become visible.

Energy source	Taiwan's theoretical potential	2025 status	Government target / timeline	Main physical limits
Offshore wind	Among the world's best	4.5 GW	13 GW by 2030, 55 GW by 2050	Marine engineering / fishery conflicts
Solar PV	Rooftops + agrivoltaics	14.3 GW	31 GW by 2030	Land acquisition / intermittency
Geothermal (shallow)	≤ 1,000 MW	7.4 MW	200 MW by 2030, 6 GW by 2050	Underground uncertainty / financing
Geothermal (deep EGS)	33,640 MW (theoretical)	Laboratory stage	2040+	EGS technology not commercialized
Marine energy	9.4 GW (theoretical)	100 kW trial	2030+	Durability of ocean engineering
Hydrogen (green hydrogen)	Requires large amounts of renewable electricity	Hsinta Power Plant trial	2030+	Electrolysis cost / leakage GWP
Maanshan extension	1,902 MW	Shut down in 2025	Restart as early as 2028	Nuclear waste / nuclear safety review
Fourth-generation nuclear SMR	No local plan	U.S. trial operation in 2030	2045+	Sodium-cooled safety / nuclear proliferation

This table answers one question: Can Taiwan reach 2050 net zero without nuclear power?

Technically, yes. The National Development Council's roadmap lists 12 key strategies and estimates investment of NT$9 trillion³⁶. But it requires offshore wind, solar photovoltaics, geothermal energy, marine energy, hydrogen, and energy storage to all meet their respective targets at the same time. At present, geothermal energy is 27-fold short, marine energy is still at the kW level, hydrogen remains in trials, and storage costs are still high.

Every physical limit is time.

In Hsu Huang-hsiung's model, Taiwan after 2060 has no winter³⁷. In coastal risk assessments, low-lying areas in western Taiwan face higher pressure from sea-level rise and storm surges³⁸. From 1911 to 2020, Taiwan's annual mean temperature has already risen 1.6°C, nearly one and a half times the global average over the same period, 1.1°C³⁷.

An Island Warming One and a Half Times Faster

In the summer of 2017, Hsu Huang-hsiung of Academia Sinica's Research Center for Environmental Changes stared at data on his screen and made a prediction that even his colleagues were reluctant to say publicly: if emissions trends did not change, winter in Taiwan might disappear entirely after 2060³⁷. Winter days would fall to zero, and summer would stretch to seven months.

This is not science fiction. The number of days above 35°C in Taipei surged from three days a year in the 1960s to 15 days in the past decade³⁹. The south is worse: Tainan and Kaohsiung already have more than 30 high-temperature days per year.

In the same building, Wang Chung-ho of the Institute of Earth Sciences was calculating another set of numbers. His conclusion was just as unsettling: the sea level around Taiwan is rising at twice the global average³⁸. Multiple simulations indicate that sea-level rise and storm surges will expose low-lying coastal areas in western Taiwan to higher flood risk; among the six special municipalities, exposed populations and land area in New Taipei, Tainan, and Kaohsiung have drawn particular concern.

The temperament of rain has changed too. Taiwan's total rainfall has not clearly declined, but rain no longer falls when it should, and when it does fall, it pours. Spring rainfall has sharply decreased, and the dry season is drier. In 2021, Taiwan suffered its worst drought in 56 years. Reservoir levels hit historic lows, and TSMC at one point sent water trucks to supply factories⁴⁰. In May of the same year, two major blackouts struck the island in succession.

The number of days with more than 200 millimeters of rain in a single day rose from an annual average of five in the 1960s to eight in recent years. In 2009, Typhoon Morakot set a cumulative rainfall record of 2,884 millimeters at Alishan⁴¹, with three days of rain equivalent to a full year of rainfall in Taipei. During that disaster, Xiaolin Village in Jiaxian, Kaohsiung, was buried before dawn by debris from a collapse on Xiandu Mountain, killing 491 people⁴².

"Every chair represents a family member." Survivor Wang Min-liang later told visitors this in Xiaolin Memorial Park. He founded the Sunlight Xiaolin Community and led the community's Taivoan song and dance troupe on performances across Taiwan. (From PTS's Our Island)

The 2024 National Climate Change Science Report, led by Hsu Huang-hsiung, states that extreme rainfall events that currently occur once every 50 years may in the future occur once every 10 years⁴³. Yunlin, Tainan, and Keelung are the areas with the highest coastal flood risk.

For an island of 23 million people, Taiwan's carbon emissions are disproportionately large: measured by fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions, annual emissions are about 280 million metric tons, or about 11.7 metric tons per capita, among the world's higher levels; depending on databases and statistical methods, Taiwan ranks around the twenties globally⁴⁴. Emissions are highly concentrated in energy use and power supply. The energy sector accounts for the largest share, and the electricity mix remains the core of decarbonization pressure. The root of the problem is the electricity structure: in Taiwan's 2024 power generation mix, gas accounted for about 42.4%, coal about 39.3%, gas surpassed coal for the first time, renewable energy about 11.6%, and nuclear power about 4.2%³⁵. This remains a highly fossil-fuel-dependent energy system, and Taiwan relies on imports for 98% of its energy. Energy security and the climate crisis are the same problem.

Democracy and Physics in Parallel

The Maanshan referendum on the evening of August 23, 2025, pushed all the contradictions in this problem onto the vote-count screen.

74% support, 29.53% turnout, failure to pass the threshold, Taipower's March 2026 submission, restart possible as early as 2028. At the same time: 97,672 barrels on Lanyu, Finland's Onkalo taking 50 years, geothermal energy 27-fold behind, marine energy still at 100 kW, fourth-generation nuclear power not until 2045. Every number asks: Can the speed of democracy keep up with the speed of physics?

Democratic timeline	Physical timeline
2025/08/23 referendum vote count	Lanyu opened in 1982, may still be there in 2057
2025/08/25 three-principles press conference	Nuclear waste isolation for 100,000 years
2026/03/27 Taipower submission	Finland took 50 years for a final repository
2028 earliest restart	Geothermal energy 27-fold behind
2050 net-zero target	Marine energy still in 100 kW trials

No one knows whether NT$9 trillion can buy a different future. But we have already begun to see the consequences of not spending it: Hsu Huang-hsiung's 2060 without winter, Morakot's 2,884 millimeters, May 13 rolling blackouts, the rupture of the algal reef referendum, and Lanyu's 44-year wait.

PanSci reports, citing industry consensus, that "the fastest-progressing final repository in the world is Finland's Onkalo project, which received a trial operation permit in August 2024. Planning for this project began in the 1970s, and it took nearly half a century to reach the trial-operation stage"⁹. Taiwan has not even finalized the siting of its final repository. Even if Maanshan restarts in 2028, every newly produced fuel rod during the restart period will also need somewhere to go.

Lanyu's 97,672 barrels will not disappear because a referendum passes or fails. They are there now, will very likely still be there in 2029, and, if relocation misses the deadline again, will still be there in 2057.

✦ On August 23, 2025, the referendum failed. On March 27, 2026, Taipower submitted the application anyway. Between these two dates, physical limits did not change once. What changed is whether we are willing to admit that this island, dependent on imports for 98% of its energy, is lining up to face every physical limit no one wants to face.

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Further reading:

• History of Taiwan's Environmental Movement — From anti-nuclear activism to anti-air-pollution campaigns, how the Tao of Lanyu, Meinong's anti-reservoir movement, and the algal reef referendum shaped today's energy politics
• Taiwan's Marine Pollution Governance and Conservation Challenges — 80% coral bleaching at the Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant outlet, marine debris, and the ecological intersection with offshore wind power
• Taiwan's Hot Springs and Geothermal Energy — From the failure of Qingshui Geothermal in 1981 to its 2024 restart, how 30 years of geothermal silence took shape
• Taiwan's Environmental Justice and NIMBY Controversies — Lanyu, algal reefs, and Meinong: the distributive politics of the costs of energy transition
• Taiwan's Industrial Transformation and Upgrading — From energy-intensive manufacturing to the green energy industry, TSMC's RE100, CBAM, and the energy ledger of the "sacred mountain protecting the nation"
• Taiwan's Agricultural Modernization — Agricultural transformation pressure and land-use conflict behind agrivoltaics
• Plum Rains — Local observations of climate change in "spring rains fail to come, and plum rains concentrate"

References

Image Sources

• Exterior of the Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant in Hengchun, Pingtung (hero): Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant, Nan Wan (photo: M. Weitzel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
• Onkalo underground repository in Olkiluoto, Finland: Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository entrance (photo: Posiva Oy, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
• Formosa offshore wind farm off Miaoli: Hai Long offshore wind farm (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
• Rooftop solar panels at freeway service area: Xihu Service Area solar panels (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

1. Central Election Commission: Announcement of the August 23, 2025 national referendum results — ; Central News Agency: Maanshan extension referendum receives 4.34 million yes votes but fails to meet one-quarter threshold; Taipower: Explanation of submission of Maanshan restart plan to the Nuclear Safety Commission (2026/03/27) — August 23, 2025 Maanshan extension referendum: 4,342,206 yes votes (74.17%), 1,511,693 no votes, turnout 29.53%, failing to meet the Referendum Act threshold of one quarter of all eligible voters (5,000,523 votes), so the referendum did not pass. On March 27, 2026, Taipower submitted a Maanshan restart plan application to the Nuclear Safety Commission. The safety inspection is expected to take about 18 months, with restart possible as early as 2028.↩
2. Central News Agency: Lai Ching-te's remarks after the Maanshan referendum propose three principles: nuclear safety, nuclear waste, and social consensus — On August 25, 2025, President Lai Ching-te issued a formal response to the result of the Maanshan extension referendum, proposing three principles for any future restart of nuclear power: no nuclear safety concerns, a solution for nuclear waste, and social consensus, and instructing the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Nuclear Safety Commission to begin safety inspection procedures and evaluation.↩
3. Bureau of Energy, Ministry of Economic Affairs: Announcement launching the selection mechanism for Phase 3 offshore wind zonal development — The Ministry of Economic Affairs announced on March 27, 2026, that as of March 26, 2026, Taiwan's cumulative installed offshore wind capacity was about 4.5 GW; the Phase 3 allocation capacity was 3.6 GW, with completion and grid connection targeted for 2030 to 2031.↩
4. Atomic Energy Council: Announcement of storage volume at the Lanyu storage facility (2024) — Official AEC announcement stating that as of 2024 the Lanyu low-level radioactive waste storage facility held a cumulative 97,672 barrels; since opening in 1982, relocation promises were missed in 1996, 2002, 2016, 2019, and 2023, and the AEC requires Taipower to complete relocation by 2029. Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05.↩
5. Bureau of Energy, Ministry of Economic Affairs: Geothermal power targets and commercial operation capacity (2025) — Government geothermal power policy targets: 200 MW by 2030 and 6 GW, or 6,000 MW, by 2050; as of the end of 2025, Taiwan's commercial geothermal capacity was about 7.4 MW, mainly Qingshui Geothermal in Yilan at 4.2 MW and some small units, about 27-fold short of the 2030 target.↩
6. Wikipedia: Lanyu storage facility — Before the Lanyu storage facility opened in 1982, Taipower told Tao residents it was building a "fish cannery" and did not fully inform them of the nature of nuclear waste storage; in 1988, Tao people launched their first "drive out evil spirits" protest, becoming the starting point of Taiwan's Indigenous environmental movement.↩
7. PanSci: Guosheng retires, nuclear waste still needs to stay for 20 years — Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05. The Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant was formally decommissioned at the end of 2023, but nuclear fuel rods remain hot and highly radioactive after reactor decommissioning and must be cooled in on-site fuel pools for at least five years before they have any chance of being moved out; Daren Township, Taitung County, is a candidate site for the final repository for low-level nuclear waste, but the siting process is trapped by local political resistance.↩
8. PanSci: What is the real problem with extending nuclear power? — Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05. Land-use issues for dry storage facilities at nuclear power plants have been stalled for more than 11 years. The New Taipei City government has refused to approve dry storage facilities, causing spent fuel rods from the Jinshan and Guosheng plants to remain in on-site fuel pools and exceed original design capacity; the biggest obstacle to extending nuclear power is where to put spent nuclear fuel.↩
9. PanSci: If nuclear waste has nowhere to go, are there other methods? — Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05. The fastest-progressing final repository in the world is Finland's Onkalo project, which received a trial operation permit in August 2024 and has taken nearly half a century since planning began in the 1970s; a final repository must isolate waste for more than 100,000 years, a timescale far longer than the existence of human civilization.↩
10. Posiva Oy: Onkalo final repository design overview — Official explanation from Posiva, the Finnish company operating the Onkalo repository. The design goal is to isolate high-level radioactive nuclear waste for at least 100,000 years, using a multiple-barrier system, including copper canisters, bentonite, and granite layers, and long-term memory warning system design.↩
11. Daren Township Office, Taitung County: Low-level radioactive waste final repository issue — Daren Township, Taitung County, is one of two candidate sites for a final repository for low-level nuclear waste, the other being Wuqiu, Kinmen. Local opinion is divided, Indigenous communities strongly oppose the plan, and a siting referendum has not yet been successfully held.↩
12. PanSci: Feasibility analysis of nuclear waste disposal in space — Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05. Disposal of nuclear waste in space is physically feasible but requires an extremely stable and reliable rocket; if launch fails, the radioactive contamination caused on Earth would be difficult to estimate. Given current rocket failure rates, about one launch in every 100 would pose a risk, failing practical engineering requirements.↩
13. PanSci: Improved natural gas power technology that produces no carbon dioxide? Gray hydrogen, blue hydrogen, green hydrogen — Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05. Hydrogen color codes correspond to different production methods: gray hydrogen (natural gas SMR emitting CO₂), blue hydrogen (gray hydrogen + CCS), green hydrogen (water electrolysis using renewable electricity), and blue-green hydrogen (methane pyrolysis with solid carbon and no CO₂ emissions); Taipower and Academia Sinica have cooperated on testing decarbonized hydrogen combustion technology at Hsinta Power Plant.↩
14. PanSci: Elon Musk disdains it; Bill Gates treasures it! Hydrogen energy — Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05. In addition to green hydrogen, emerging white hydrogen / gold hydrogen refers to hydrogen naturally formed underground. The USGS estimates reserves may reach tens of billions of tons; however, hydrogen's GWP100 is 11.6 times that of carbon dioxide, and leakage will worsen warming, though academia still debates a GWP range of 7 to 37.↩
15. USGS: Geological Hydrogen — A New Energy Frontier (2023) — A 2023 U.S. Geological Survey report on geological hydrogen, estimating that global underground natural hydrogen reserves may reach tens of billions of tons, enough to supply humanity's energy needs for several hundred years; France and Mali already have commercial exploration cases, while Taiwan sits on an active plate boundary but currently has no exploration plan.↩
16. Central News Agency: Yilan Tuchang geothermal power plant breaks ground, expected to start in 2026 — The 5.4 MW unit of Yilan County's Tuchang geothermal power plant began construction in 2024 and is expected to start in early 2026. It is Taiwan's second commercial geothermal power plant at MW scale; as of the end of 2025, Taiwan's commercial geothermal capacity was about 7.4 MW, including Qingshui Geothermal at 4.2 MW and other small units.↩
17. PanSci: Is geothermal power development feasible in Taiwan? Part 1 — Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05. According to National Taiwan University research, deep geothermal energy below five kilometers has potential generation capacity of 33,640 MW, equivalent to about 12 Fourth Nuclear Power Plants, but development requires Enhanced Geothermal System technology, which is still in the R&D stage; shallow geothermal potential within three kilometers of depth is estimated at no more than 1,000 MW.↩
18. PanSci: Geothermal advantages and Taiwan field applications — Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05. Geothermal energy is not affected by weather and is a baseload source that can generate electricity steadily 24 hours a day, giving it unique value in the energy mix; however, underground uncertainty causes financing difficulties, the fundamental bottleneck slowing Taiwan's geothermal development.↩
19. PanSci: The higher the "sacred mountain protecting the nation" rises, the greater the power pressure: Taiwan's marine energy as a solution — Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05. Marine energy around Taiwan, including ocean currents, waves, and ocean thermal energy, has theoretical potential of 9.4 GW; the Kuroshio passes Taiwan's east coast and is the most promising source of ocean-current energy, and Academia Sinica completed testing of a 100 kW experimental unit in 2021.↩
20. PanSci: Taiwan's possibilities for ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) — Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05. OTEC uses the temperature difference between warm surface water, 25 to 28°C, and cold deep water, 5°C, to generate electricity. The waters off eastern Taiwan have a large depth gradient and are theoretically ideal, but the technology is still experimental, with no commercial power plant operating globally.↩
21. PanSci: Bill Gates's fourth-generation nuclear power plant finally begins construction — Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05. The biggest difference between a Natrium reactor and a traditional nuclear power plant is the coolant: traditional reactors use water, while Natrium uses liquid metallic sodium. Sodium has a high boiling point and can operate at higher temperatures to improve reactor efficiency, and its thermal conductivity is 100 times that of water.↩
22. TechOrange: TerraPower Natrium project begins construction in Wyoming in 2026 — TerraPower's Natrium fourth-generation nuclear power plant project officially broke ground in Kemmerer, Wyoming, in April 2026, slightly later than originally planned, and is expected to be completed in 2030. It is a key global milestone in the commercialization of fourth-generation sodium-cooled fast reactors.↩
23. PanSci: Nuclear proliferation risks of fourth-generation nuclear power — Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05. Fast neutron reactors require high-concentration uranium fuel, and breeding reactions produce plutonium-239, an important material for making nuclear weapons; how to manage nuclear materials and prevent nuclear proliferation is a difficult problem fast neutron reactors must face.↩
24. PanSci: Safety challenges of Natrium reactors — Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05. The construction of the Natrium reactor marks technological progress in fourth-generation nuclear power plants, but its development comes with major challenges; liquid sodium reacts violently with water and is flammable, reactor operation and maintenance impose extremely high requirements on materials science, and safety data from large-scale commercial operation are currently lacking.↩
25. PanSci: Offshore wind turbines are expensive and troublesome to build, so why is Taiwan still developing them vigorously? — Content Curation Partner per MOU 2026-05-05. Because of topographic factors, the Taiwan Strait forms a "channeling effect," causing wind speeds in the strait to be far higher than in surrounding waters and making Taiwan one of the world's most promising locations for offshore wind development.↩
26. PV Magazine: Taiwan solar and offshore wind targets — Reports Ørsted's completion of 920 MW across Greater Changhua 2b and 4, and Taiwan's plan to add 8.2 GW of solar PV and offshore wind by the end of 2026.↩
27. Environmental Information Center: Changhua fishers protest offshore wind power (2022) — Reports that more than 100 fishers went to the Executive Yuan to protest offshore wind farm navigation exclusion zones that blocked waters used for generations, chanting the slogan "destroying fishers."↩
28. Environmental Information Center: Court rules offshore wind navigation restrictions illegal (2025) — Taiwan's first court ruling challenging the spatial governance of offshore wind power, finding that navigation restrictions infringed on fishers' rights and causing shock in energy circles.↩
29. Taipower: Renewable energy generation statistics — Official Taiwan Power Company statistics, containing annual data on installed capacity and generation by type of renewable energy; in 2024, installed solar PV capacity was 14,281 MW and generation was 14.9 billion kWh.↩
30. Taipower: Preliminary investigation of the May 13 blackout released — ; Ministry of Economic Affairs: Review report on the May 13 and May 17 blackout incidents — Official materials explain that the May 13 incident involved erroneous operation of switch No. 3541, causing an instantaneous reduction of about 2.2 GW in supply capacity and affecting about four million households, and also summarize the May 17 incident and subsequent review.↩
31. Presidential Office press release: Taiwan Carbon Solution Exchange inaugurated — ; Taiwan Stock Exchange 2023 annual report; Anue: Taiwan Carbon Solution Exchange expected to launch at the end of July with north-south division of operations — The carbon exchange was inaugurated on August 7, 2023; planned capital was NT$1.5 billion, with initial paid-in capital of NT$1 billion, of which the Taiwan Stock Exchange contributed NT$600 million and the National Development Fund contributed NT$400 million. The TWSE annual report also states that the first batch of international carbon credit transactions totaled 88,520 metric tons CO2e, with 27 participating companies, or 45 including subsidiaries of financial holding companies.↩
32. KPMG Taiwan: Carbon pricing trend analysis (2025) — Analyzes market dynamics after Taiwan's 2025 carbon fee system took effect, including domestic carbon credit pricing, such as Formosa Plastics at NT$3,000 per metric ton and Hanbao Agriculture and Livestock at NT$3,000 to NT$4,000 per metric ton, and the challenge of low trading volume.↩
33. Official EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism page — CBAM entered its transitional phase in October 2023 and will be fully implemented in 2026, covering six major product categories: steel, cement, aluminum, fertilizers, electricity, and hydrogen.↩
34. Reccessary: Taiwan energy policy outlook 2025 — Reports Lai Ching-te's 2024 National Day address announcing the policy direction of a "second energy transition": diversified green energy, deep energy conservation, and advanced energy storage.↩
35. Bureau of Energy, Ministry of Economic Affairs statistics: Electricity generation structure by fuel type — ; Ministry of Environment Energy Information Platform: Electricity structure; Economic Daily News: Ministry of Economic Affairs says renewable energy share can reach 20% starting in November 2026 — According to Bureau of Energy statistics, in 2024 gas accounted for about 42.4%, coal about 39.3%, renewables about 11.5% to 11.6%, and nuclear about 4.2%; the Ministry of Environment Energy Information Platform shows that in 2025 renewables accounted for 13.1% of national total generation, while Taipower system power purchase and generation structure charts commonly show about 12.7%, reflecting different definitions. In May 2025, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said it estimated 20% could be reached starting in November 2026 and about 30% by 2030.↩
36. Presidential Office press release: Tsai Ing-wen's 2021 Earth Day remarks — Tsai Ing-wen, for the first time as president, declared that "the 2050 net-zero transition is the world's goal, and it is also Taiwan's goal," establishing the policy basis for the National Development Council's subsequent net-zero roadmap.↩
37. United Daily News Vision Project: Interview with Hsu Huang-hsiung — A team led by Hsu Huang-hsiung, Distinguished Research Fellow at Academia Sinica's Research Center for Environmental Changes, analyzed Taiwan temperature data from 1911 to 2020 and found that Taiwan has warmed 1.6°C over a century, winter has shortened by nearly half, and under the worst-case scenario the number of winter days may fall to zero after 2060.↩
38. CSRone Sustainability Think Tank: Interview with Wang Chung-ho — Wang Chung-ho, Adjunct Research Fellow at Academia Sinica's Institute of Earth Sciences, has long tracked sea-level change around Taiwan and notes that the rise around Taiwan is faster than the global average. This article uses a more conservative description of risk when citing the piece, avoiding simplifying different research scenarios into an absolute conclusion.↩
39. Central Weather Administration Climate Change Information Platform — Taiwan's historical climate observation database, containing century-scale records of temperature, rainfall, and extreme weather events at observation stations, including statistics on the increasing number of days above 35°C in Taipei.↩
40. BBC Chinese: Taiwan's worst drought in 56 years (2021) — Reports on the 2021 drought in central and southern Taiwan, when reservoir storage fell below 10% and technology companies including TSMC deployed water trucks as emergency measures.↩
41. National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction: Typhoon Morakot disaster record — Official disaster archive recording cumulative rainfall of 2,884 millimeters at the Alishan station during Typhoon Morakot, the highest record in Taiwan's meteorological observation history.↩
42. The Reporter: Investigation into the destruction of Xiaolin Village — An in-depth investigation into the collapse of Xiandu Mountain over Xiaolin Village and the full context of the 491 deaths, including geological causes and failures in the warning system.↩
43. Environmental Information Center: 2024 National Climate Change Science Report — Reports key findings from the latest science report led by Hsu Huang-hsiung: once-in-50-year extreme rainfall may become once-in-10-year rainfall, and days above 36°C may increase by 75 days.↩
44. Environmental Protection Administration greenhouse gas emissions statistics — Taiwan's official greenhouse gas emissions database, containing annual national emissions inventories, sectoral emissions, and per-capita emissions data.↩