Taiwan's Nuclear Debate: Anti-Nuclear Was the Common Language of Democracy, Climate Crisis Has Shuffled Every Hand

30-Second Overview: On August 23, 2025, Taiwan held a referendum on whether to "restart Nuclear Plant No. 3." 4.34 million people voted in favor, with 74% approval, but lost because the voter turnout was only 29.53%, failing to meet the 5 million vote threshold. This was Taiwan's third nuclear referendum in forty years—the 2018 "Nuclear for Green" passed, the 2021 "Nuclear Plant No. 4 Commercial Operation" was rejected, and the 2025 "Nuclear Plant No. 3 Extension" hit the threshold wall. Each result was different, yet the ground barely moved with the votes. More paradoxically, the very government that wrote "Nuclear-Free Homeland" into its party platform and whose president publicly cast a "no" vote is the one pushing the reactor, shut down just three months prior, toward restart. Anti-nuclear was once the common language of Taiwan's democratic movement; with the arrival of the climate crisis, every side in this debate has been reshuffled, and Taiwan remains without consensus.

On the evening of August 23, 2025, the Central Election Commission's vote count froze: the Nuclear Plant No. 3 extension referendum, with 4,341,432 votes in favor and 1,511,693 against¹. The "yes" votes were nearly three times the "no" votes, with 74.17% saying "yes"².

By the common intuition of democracy, the outcome of this debate should have been clear. But it lost.

Because the Referendum Act stipulates that "yes" votes must exceed one-quarter of the total voting population nationwide; the threshold this time was 5,000,523 votes; the voter turnout was only 29.53%, and the "yes" votes didn't even touch the threshold¹. Huang Kuo-chang, chairman of the People First Party and the referendum proposer, said after the vote count that the "yes" votes for this referendum "far exceeded the 'no' votes by nearly three times"³. Cui Suxin, spokesperson for the National Abolition of Nuclear Energy Action Platform, pointed out: "Even though the 'yes' votes are higher than the 'no' votes, the final referendum result did not pass and has no legal effect."⁴ These two sentences describe the same set of numbers but draw opposite conclusions.

Won the debate, lost the system. This paradox of the summer of 2025 is the entry point to understanding the entire Taiwan nuclear energy discussion: on the surface, it asks "is nuclear energy good or bad," but underneath, they are arguing about something else.

The Yellow Flag That Shouted "I Am Human, I Am Anti-Nuclear"

To understand why this debate is so difficult, we must return to when it was not yet an "energy debate." In January 2013, a group of arts and culture figures initiated a petition, designing a yellow flag with red text that read "I Am Human, I Am Anti-Nuclear"⁵. On March 9 of that year, approximately 220,000 people across Taiwan took to the streets—120,000 in Taipei, 30,000 in Taichung, 70,000 in Tainan, and 2,000–3,000 in Taitung—making it the largest march in the history of Taiwan's anti-nuclear movement⁶. This yellow flag was planted at bookstore entrances, hung in coffee shop windows, and stuck on young people's backpacks, becoming a visual tattoo for a generation.

But the roots of this flag go much deeper than 2013, and initially had little to do with nuclear energy. In 1986, residents of Lugang heard that the American company DuPont was coming to set up a titanium dioxide plant. Local teacher Li Dongliang initiated a petition and street march, shouting "I Love Lugang, Not DuPont"⁷. The following March, DuPont announced the cancellation of the plant; in August of the same year, the Environmental Protection Bureau was established⁸. The Lugang anti-DuPont movement was an anti-pollution movement, not inherently anti-nuclear—but it was the seed of Taiwan's post-war street environmental movement. That same energy quickly flowed toward another target: Nuclear Plant No. 4.

In 1988, residents of Gongliao established the Yanliao Anti-Nuclear Self-Help Association⁹. This plant, later named "Longmen" (Nuclear Plant No. 4), has been building for over thirty years since its site selection in Yanliao in 1980, yet has generated zero commercial power¹⁰. The most tragic page in between was the "Gongliao 1003 Incident" of 1991: during the protest, a resident drove a car and killed security police officer Yang Chaojing, causing the movement to hit a low point⁹. In 1994, Gongliao held a local referendum, with 96.13% of voters opposing Nuclear Plant No. 4—although the Referendum Act had not yet passed, this vote had no legal effect¹¹.

📝 Curator's Note

The common narrative is "anti-nuclear is a progressive value, so the progressive camp is anti-nuclear." But this causality is actually reversed. Taiwan's anti-nuclear movement is unique because it grew in the crack where the martial law regime was loosening. Sociologist Ho Ming-hsiu writes directly in his research at Cambridge University: "The rise of anti-nuclear voices is closely related to democratic opening."¹² In other words, Taiwanese people in the 1980s and 90s went to the streets to oppose nuclear energy, truly clashing with an authoritarian government that did not allow people to speak; Nuclear Plant No. 4 was just one of the few concrete targets that could unite people in that era. Anti-nuclear thus inherited all the legitimacy of the democratic movement. This also planted the foreshadowing for thirty years later: when nuclear energy became a "climate issue," this moral framework tied to democracy could no longer handle the new questions.

Pushing this origin to its peak was one person's body.

On the morning of April 22, 2014, former DPP Chairman Lin Yi-hsiung entered the Yiguang Church in Taipei and began an indefinite fast, demanding the halt of Nuclear Plant No. 4 construction¹³. The location of Yiguang Church itself is a wound—on February 28, 1980, Lin Yi-hsiung's mother and a pair of twin daughters were stabbed to death in the old house here, known as the "Lin Family Tragedy," which remains unsolved to this day¹⁴. Lin Yi-hsiung was an extra-parliamentary sufferer of the Formosa Incident and one of the first elected DPP chairmen; his fast connected the anti-nuclear movement with the bloodline of Taiwan's democratic movement into one.

Nine days later, this fast ended. On April 27, the then-ruling Ma Ying-jeou government and the Kuomintang reached a consensus: Nuclear Plant No. 4 Unit 1 would be sealed after safety inspection, and Unit 2 would be halted; on April 28, the Executive Yuan officially announced the sealing; on April 30, Lin Yi-hsiung stopped fasting¹³.

It is worth remembering: the government that pressed the pause button on Nuclear Plant No. 4 was not the anti-nuclear DPP, but the ruling Kuomintang government. This detail foreshadows the most chaotic part of the subsequent debate—the stance of every side is not as stable as you think.

Three Votes Over Seven Years, Yet the Ground Barely Moved

The year after Lin Yi-hsiung's fast, the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 had already flipped global nuclear politics¹⁰. Taiwan's society also learned, in these years, to use a new tool to handle this question: the referendum.

But the answers this tool gave were different three times.

On November 24, 2018, the "Nuclear for Green" referendum (Case No. 16) passed. It sought to abolish the statutory deadline in the Electricity Act stating "nuclear power generation equipment should cease operation before 2025"—5,895,560 votes in favor, with a voter turnout of 54.83%¹⁵. On the surface, this was a major victory for pro-nuclear forces.

On December 18, 2021, the "Nuclear Plant No. 4 Commercial Operation" referendum (Case No. 17) was rejected. 3,804,689 votes in favor, 4,262,517 against, with a voter turnout of 41.09%, failing to meet the threshold¹⁶. Nuclear Plant No. 4, built for thirty years without generating a single watt of electricity, was formally sentenced to death by the people.

On August 23, 2025, it was the opening one: the Nuclear Plant No. 3 extension referendum (Case No. 21), with 74% approval but stuck at the threshold¹.

Three votes over seven years, approval rates dropping from 59% to 47% then jumping to 74%, yet the results were Pass, Reject, Hit Threshold—like three dice, each time showing different numbers. Direct democracy can handle an arithmetic problem like "how much should electricity prices rise," but cannot handle a difficult problem where scientific judgment and value sorting are intertwined.

More difficult is the paradox left by "Nuclear for Green." The vote in 2018 clearly abolished the legal text of the 2025 non-nuclear deadline, but the subsequent DPP government chose to voluntarily not extend the service, and Taiwan continued to move step by step toward non-nuclear by 2025¹⁷. Therefore, the saying "the Nuclear-Free Homeland has already become invalid" circulated on the internet, which Fact-Checking Center Taiwan determined was misinformation: what was abolished was only the timeline in the Electricity Act, the "Nuclear-Free Homeland" goal revealed in Article 23 of the Basic Environmental Act remains effective¹⁷. The law was torn in half, but the policy didn't let go—this is the most typical shape of Taiwan's nuclear energy discussion: every "win" comes with an unresolved tail.

A Government That Shut Down a Reactor, Then Wanted to Restart It

In May 2025, Taiwan's power grid experienced a historic moment.

On the evening of May 17, Nuclear Plant No. 3 Unit 2 in Hengchun, Pingtung began load reduction, disconnected at night, and officially shut down on the early morning of May 18¹⁸. This was the first time Taiwan's power grid had no nuclear power at all. Some media described Taiwan as becoming the "Asia's First, World's Second" nuclear-free homeland—but this statement needs caution, as Italy had already stopped domestic nuclear power as early as 1990¹⁹.

According to the "Nuclear-Free Homeland" script, the story should have ended here. But what happened in the following months tore up the script.

Just four days before the shutdown, on May 13, 2025, the Legislative Yuan passed the third reading of the Amendment to Article 6 of the Nuclear Reactor Facility Control Act, with 61 votes in favor and 50 against, adding a clause that "licenses can be applied for extension after expiration," with a maximum operating life of 40 plus 20, totaling 60 years²⁰. Nuclear Plant No. 3 Unit 2's license exactly expired on May 17—the amendment was passed four days before expiration.

By November 27, the Ministry of Economic Affairs determined the evaluation results: Nuclear Plant No. 1 is infeasible due to equipment demolition and being the same type as Fukushima; Nuclear Plants No. 2 and No. 3 have restart feasibility, requiring 1.5 to 2 years of self-inspection²¹. In March 2026, the Lai Ching-te government announced that Nuclear Plants No. 2 and No. 3 meet the restart conditions, and the Taiwan Power Company submitted documents to the Nuclear and New Energy Administration, with Nuclear Plant No. 3 potentially restarting as early as 2028²².

Thus appeared this scene: a government that wrote "Nuclear-Free Homeland" into its party platform, personally shut down the island's last reactor, and three months later personally pushed it toward restart.

Lai Ching-te, caught in the middle, offered a stance called "pragmatic." He proposed three principles: "Nuclear Safety Without Worry, Nuclear Waste Has Solutions, Society Has Consensus," emphasizing "these three principles are indispensable," plus two musts—the Nuclear and New Energy Administration must formulate measures, and the Taiwan Power Company must complete self-inspection²³. But on August 13, 2025, ten days before the referendum, he publicly stated: "For the 8/23 referendum, I will go vote, let us together cast a 'no' vote."²⁴

⚠️ Controversial Viewpoint

How to read a government publicly opposing a referendum on "restarting a power plant it manages" depends on which side you stand on.

Pro-nuclear camps see contradiction and buck-passing: If you are sending documents for restart, why call on people to vote no? Kuomintang Chairman Chu Li-lun advocates that the government should "rebuild energy security and resilience" and "pragmatically adjust erroneous energy policies"²⁵.

The Lai Ching-te government's explanation is about procedure and authorization: The referendum case was proposed by the opposition parties and tied to "immediate continuation," which is a different path from the government's主张 of "Nuclear and New Energy Administration把关, Taiwan Power Company self-inspection before discussion"; voting no is opposing "skipping safety procedures to restart immediately," not opposing nuclear energy itself. Premier Chuo Rong-tai explained this pragmatism more plainly: "Electricity is computing power, computing power is national power," "Anti-nuclear is not a sacred tablet"²⁶.

Both readings hold up, depending on whether you focus on the "outcome (whether to have nuclear power)" or the "procedure (how to decide)." This is the epitome of why Taiwan's nuclear energy discussion is unsolvable—even the same action of the same government can be honestly read as two opposite things.

The Loudest Pro-Nuclear Flagbearer Is a Laptop Manufacturer

If the anti-nuclear movement of the martial law era was a moral movement, the most surprising aspect of the recent resurgence of pro-nuclear voices is its highest-decibel spokesperson: standing on the front line, carrying the heaviest weight, is a laptop manufacturer.

Hsu Tsyong-min, Chairman of Pegatron, has become the highest-decibel voice in Taiwan's pro-nuclear discourse in recent years. His words are direct and leave no room for ambiguity: "Not just Taiwan, including globally, if you do not rely on nuclear energy, you rely on solar plus wind power to save the earth, there is no hope."²⁷ He advocates for nuclear power at about 1.42 NTD per kWh, and criticizes many international large companies pursuing RE100 (100% renewable energy) as "idealistic but somewhat castles in the air," believing that CFE (24-hour carbon-free electricity) incorporating nuclear energy "can better achieve carbon neutrality goals"²⁸.

This is the most critical change after the nuclear energy discussion was reshuffled by the climate crisis: pro-nuclear discourse has been de-ideologized. Its starting point has shifted from "nuclear energy is safe" to "carbon reduction is non-negotiable," "data centers consume electricity," "energy cannot be interrupted"—these industrial realities.

The pro-nuclear camp can roughly be divided into three subgroups, each with different focuses. The popular science camp, represented by Huang Shih-hsiu, founder of "Nuclear Energy Rumor Terminator," focuses on cost: "Nuclear power costs 1.5 NTD per kWh, renewable energy 5.5 NTD per kWh."²⁹ The academic camp, represented by Ye Zong-guang of National Tsing Hua University, focuses on technical clarification, for example, emphasizing that "the Hengchun Fault near Nuclear Plant No. 3 is different from the 'fault fracture zone' under the plant site, which the public often confuses"³⁰. The industry camp is this group of entrepreneurs, like Hsu Tsyong-min.

Even NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang backed them up on August 22, 2025, the day before the referendum, saying nuclear energy "is an excellent option"³¹.

💡 Did You Know

Huang Shih-hsiu also has a more intense rhetoric that has circulated widely: "Anti-nuclear is anti-American; anti-nuclear is selling out the country; anti-nuclear is licking the CCP."²⁹ This sentence directly connects energy choices with national identity, making it one of the most aggressive discourses in the pro-nuclear camp. Taiwan.md places it here verbatim, not to endorse it, but to truthfully present the temperature of this debate—when nuclear energy is tied into geopolitics and unification-independence coordinates, originally rational discussions of engineering and cost easily turn into a loyalty test of "whether you love Taiwan." This heating up is shared by both anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear sides; the higher it rises, the further consensus gets.

But be careful of a common misreading: you cannot say "the DPP has already flipped to pro-nuclear" just because the industry supports nuclear and young people support nuclear.

The DPP's party platform has not changed, "Nuclear-Free Homeland" remains; the government has only opened a narrow door for "advanced nuclear energy, restart after safety inspection." More importantly, even the DPP's own supporters have split. According to a poll by GVM and the Taiwan Foundation for Sustainable Energy in October 2024, among DPP supporters, 45.2% are anti-nuclear and 44.3% are pro-nuclear, almost a dead heat³².

The Younger, The More Pro-Nuclear — A Generation Without Fukushima Memory

The clearest place for this crack is age.

The same GVM poll shows that 63.1% of the overall population supports nuclear power; for the youngest generation, aged 18 to 29, the pro-nuclear proportion is as high as 70.8%, 20 percentage points higher than the 50.2% for those over seventy³². The younger, the more pro-nuclear.

This is almost the reverse of the martial law generation's anti-nuclear tendency. The reason is not hard to understand: people who took to the streets back then had memories of Chernobyl, Fukushima, and the fear of Gongliao and Lanyu; today's climate generation grew up with nuclear disasters as historical terms in textbooks, and their current anxiety is whether warming, air pollution, and power shortages will cause Taiwan's industries to flee. The same progressive value of "for the sake of the next generation," read by two generations into opposite answers—the former feel that anti-nuclear is protecting the next generation from disasters, the latter feel that carbon reduction is leaving the earth for the next generation.

Most of the climate generation no longer hangs that 2013 yellow flag. However, young people supporting nuclear energy is more like polling trends and individual choices; Taiwan does not have an organized "Youth Pro-Nuclear Grand Alliance" equivalent to the Anti-Nuclear Platform of that era mobilizing. Writing it as an organized movement would mislead readers.

Ten Thousand Years on the Fault Line

Shuffle as they may, the place where this debate truly gets stuck, where no one can convince the other, is two physical facts that no one can avoid: earthquakes, and nuclear waste.

First, earthquakes. One of the core scientific arguments of the anti-nuclear camp is the location of Nuclear Plant No. 3. Geologist Chen Wen-shan points out: "The Hengchun Fault passes through the front gate of Nuclear Plant No. 3, about 900 meters from the reactor," and emphasizes "the fact that the fault is inside the plant site is certain"³³. Gan Chong-wei of the Green Party is more specific: "The turbine generator building of Nuclear Plant No. 3 Unit 1 is built directly on the Hengchun Fault's fracture zone."³⁴ Geologist Li Xi-di cites evaluation data, questioning Nuclear Plant No. 3's safety mechanisms under the maximum earthquake: "ground motion acceleration reached as high as 1.384G, which is more than three times the design value adopted at the time"³⁵.

The pro-nuclear camp does not deny the existence of the fault, but their framing is different. Ye Zong-guang, mentioned earlier, argues that the public often conflates the "Hengchun Fault near the plant site" with the "fault fracture zone under the plant site," and they are not the same thing³⁰.

📝 Curator's Note

Here is a detail worth noting: in the seismic resistance controversy, both anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear sides actually use the same set of numbers made by Taipower itself—the original design value of 0.4G, the reinforced 0.72G, and the evaluated 1.384G when the fault actually moves, all from Taipower's own reports. The difference is not in the data, but in the framework. The anti-nuclear side says "the evaluated value is several times the design value, too dangerous"; the pro-nuclear side says "the plant building has been reinforced, the fracture zone is not the same fault, no problem." The same set of numbers, two stories. This is why the nuclear energy discussion cannot end by "laying out scientific evidence"—when evidence itself can be interpreted in two legitimate ways, the divergence is not at the fact level, but at the value level: how much earthquake risk are you willing to bear for carbon reduction? This question has no objective answer.

If earthquakes are a probability question of "whether it will happen," nuclear waste is a problem that is certain to face and has a time scale longer than imaginable.

Taiwan has accumulated over 19,000 bundles of high-level nuclear waste and 210,000 drums of low-level nuclear waste, yet has not even one statutory final disposal site—this is the number repeatedly emphasized by anti-nuclear groups like the Earth公民 Foundation³⁶. As of May 2026, the spent nuclear fuel (high-level waste) from the three nuclear power plants totals 21,527 bundles³⁷. Former State Councilor Lin Tzu-lun explains the ethical core of this matter clearly: "Using nuclear power is transferring the cost, risk, and responsibility of nuclear waste disposal to the next generation."³⁸

The scale of the problem is most startlingly seen in the Control Yuan's investigation. The Control Yuan's report states: "Basically, there is no final disposal site for high-level radioactive waste on the Taiwan island," and warns that even "storage caves buried 500 meters deep will emerge on the surface in 50,000 years"—because Taiwan is located in an active orogenic belt, the crust moves more than one centimeter per year, while high-level nuclear waste needs to be isolated for a million-year level³⁹. Control Yuanist Tian Qiujin's two questions are almost the footnote for this entire matter: "After spending 60 billion NTD, will we really find a final disposal site?" "The backend fund is the coffin capital of nuclear power plants; once spent, it's gone."⁴⁰

The entire high-level nuclear waste final disposal plan is divided into five stages, expected to be completed from 2005 to 2055, with total costs of about 60 billion NTD (about 36.2 billion NTD already spent)⁴¹. That is, by 2055—if everything goes smoothly—Taiwan will have just "built" the disposal site, but the thing it needs to stably guard must withstand tens of thousands of years of crustal movement.

Nuclear waste needs a piece of land stable for 100,000 years; Taiwan stands on a constantly moving fault line. This is the deepest scar of this debate—it forces an island with not-so-ideal geological conditions to answer whether it wants to, and can, take responsibility for an energy that leaves a ten-thousand-year legacy. This question has no winners in the argument, only whether one is willing to bear it.

The "Canned Food Factory" on Lanyu

When we argue about nuclear energy in Taipei, in the Legislative Yuan, before the referendum ballot boxes, there is a group of people who have never been at the center of this debate, yet have already borne its cost for over forty years.

Lanyu.

In 1974, the government decided to set up a low-level nuclear waste storage site on this small island inhabited by the Tao (Yami) people, without informing the island's residents; construction began in 1978, and it was put into use in 1982, with the external claim at the time being that it was a "canned food factory"⁴². To this day, this storage site holds 97,672 drums of low-radioactive nuclear waste—respectively from Nuclear Plants No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3—stopping storage after reaching saturation in 1996⁴².

The Tao people's resistance lasted for decades: the "Exorcise Evil Spirits" action in 1988, the "One Person One Stone Fill the Port" in 1995, trying to block the port where waste is transported⁴². On August 1, 2016, Tsai Ing-wen, as President, apologized to indigenous peoples, with Lanyu nuclear waste being one item⁴³.

But what best illustrates the mood of this island is the rejection in 2019.

In November of that year, the government announced a retroactive compensation plan: a one-time compensation of 2.55 billion NTD, followed by 220 million NTD every three years⁴⁴. The Tao people rejected it. Elder Lin Hsin-yu of Lanyu said firmly: "As long as nuclear waste is not moved out of Lanyu, such death, such extinction of the tribe will continue. 'I solemnly declare, we will not take a single penny!'"⁴⁴ What they want is not money, but to move the waste away—the deadline for removal promised in the 1990s (originally 2002) has been delayed to this day⁴².

✦ The Lanyu phrase "we will not take a single penny" is the voice that should be heard most in the entire nuclear energy discussion, yet is most often overlooked. It reminds us: the cost of nuclear power is never just written on the electricity bill. When both sides of the debate are calculating "how many NTD per kWh," "how many tons of carbon reduced," there is a cost silently paid by a group of people who have no seat at the decision-making table, using forty years of land and dignity.

Enough Gas For Ten Days, Enough Uranium For Eighteen Months

What has allowed pro-nuclear discourse to quickly turn red in recent years, besides climate, is another sharper word: war.

Taiwan's energy import dependency in 2024 was as high as 95.8%—almost all energy relies on imports⁴⁵. Among them, the statutory safety stock for natural gas is about 11 days, coal about 41 days, while a batch of nuclear fuel can be used for about 18 months at once⁴⁶. The pro-nuclear camp thus proposes an "energy security" argument: if the Taiwan Strait is blocked, ships carrying natural gas cannot enter, and it won't last long; but the fuel rods in the nuclear power plant are already enough to burn for a year and a half.

This point is not shouted out of nowhere. A wargame by the US think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in August 2025 pointed out that "energy is the most fragile link in Taiwan's resilience," estimating that under a blockade scenario, natural gas would last about ten days, and power would collapse to only 20%, thus recommending extending nuclear service⁴⁷. Minister of Economic Affairs Guo Zhi-hui also said in the Legislative Yuan that energy security is a "national security issue, cannot be discussed in too much detail"⁴⁸.

But the anti-nuclear camp has two rebuttals to the "nuclear power is safer" inference.

The first is Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant—it has been shelled multiple times during the war, becoming a living textbook for the anti-nuclear side: nuclear power plants during war may turn from a fortress into a bomb that could be detonated at any time⁴⁹. The second point is that distributed energy is more durable: concentrating power generation in a few large reactors is more likely to be paralyzed at once than solar and wind distributed across various locations. Former Deputy Minister of Energy Zeng Wen-sheng responds to this anxiety from another angle, meaning the cards Taiwan holds in hand are actually more than imagined, and there is no need to bet all on nuclear power⁴⁸.

The same "energy security," pro-nuclear side reads as "so we need nuclear power more," anti-nuclear side reads as "so nuclear power is more dangerous." Once again, the same premise, two opposite conclusions.

Both Sides Say They Stand on the Side of the Future

Pulling the lens back, you will find that the whole world is reshuffling this deck, and every side in Taiwan can find examples internationally to back themselves up.

Germany completed nuclear phase-out in April 2023: the anti-nuclear side uses it to prove "advanced countries can also do without nuclear power," while the pro-nuclear side cites criticism from opposition leader Friedrich Merz, calling the phase-out a "huge mistake"—while Robert Habeck, the Green Party politician who pushed the phase-out, counters that electricity prices still fell and carbon emissions decreased after phase-out⁵⁰. After Japan's Fukushima accident, it was once completely shut down, and has now restarted 15 units, with nuclear power accounting for about 8.3% in 2024, targeting 20% by 2040; South Korea reversed the phase-out route under Yoon Suk-yeol, calling for nuclear power to account for 34.6% by 2036⁵¹.

The most frequently cited by both sides is Finland's Onkalo—a high-level nuclear waste final disposal repository dug into 1.9-billion-year-old granite, 430 meters deep. The pro-nuclear side says "look, nuclear waste has a solution"; the anti-nuclear side says "that is Finland's stable ancient landmass, Taiwan is an active orogenic belt moving every day, cannot learn from it." To supplement, Onkalo is still in the license review stage, and the public often mistakenly believes it is already officially operating⁵².

📝 Curator's Note

Putting these international cases together, you see something interesting: every case is simultaneously evidence for both sides. The same Germany, the same Finland, the same set of numbers, both anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear can use them to prove themselves right. No one is lying—both sides in this debate are actually answering two different questions. The pro-nuclear side asks: "In the moment of warming and gas cutoff, what options do we have to stabilize power supply and reduce carbon?" The anti-nuclear side asks: "Do we have the qualification to create a waste that needs guarding for 100,000 years, when we haven't even found a site for fifty years from now?" One is "current energy security," the other is "eternal intergenerational responsibility." Both questions are true, and neither should be suppressed by the other. Taiwan has had no consensus for forty years, not because one side is stupider or worse, but because both sides fear a different kind of drowning risk—one side fears nuclear disasters and ten-thousand-year nuclear waste, the other side fears power shortages, gas cutoffs, and warming. When what you fear is different, you will never agree on the other's priorities.

So this debate probably won't "end."

It will continue to return, round after round, in the forms of referendums, law amendments, submissions, and streets. The 4.34 million "yes" votes in 2025 that failed to cross the threshold, and Lanyu's "we will not take a single penny," will remain in this island's memory together, neither able to convince the other.

Next time someone asks you "does Taiwan support nuclear power or not," perhaps the most honest answer is: whether Taiwan supports nuclear power depends on which Taiwan you ask—is it the tech industry boss who is so afraid of power shortages that he can't sleep, the anti-nuclear generation that remembers Fukushima and Gongliao, the young people with no nuclear disaster memory who only fear the earth getting hotter, or the small island that has guarded nuclear waste for the whole island for forty years, yet was never asked if it was willing? Forty years and three referendums, and the ground has barely moved. Because this question never had a standard answer. It asks: how does a society together decide on an issue—nuclear waste must be stable for 100,000 years, carbon reduction must be rushed within ten years, power shortages are happening now—three clocks moving at completely different speeds.

And both sides say they stand on the side of the future.

Further Reading

• Taiwan's Climate Crisis and Net Zero Transition — The other side of the same energy question: starting from physical limits, power supply and demand, and carbon reduction timelines, it is a sister piece to this article.
• History of Taiwan's Environmental Movement — Anti-nuclear as part of Taiwan's post-war environmental movement, from the Lugang anti-DuPont to Gongliao's complete context.
• Environmental Justice and NIMBY Disputes in Taiwan — The NIMBY structure behind nuclear waste and Lanyu: why risks always fall on those with the least voice.
• Social Movements and Civic Participation — How anti-nuclear shares the same language and energy with Taiwan's democratic movement.
• Sunflower Student Movement — Civic mobilization of the same generation, understanding the era atmosphere of Lin Yi-hsiung's fast in those years.

Image Sources

• Hero / 2013 Anti-Nuclear Surrounding Legislative Yuan: Anti-nuclear protest, Legislative Yuan (VOA), provided by Voice of America, Public Domain. (Wikimedia filename follows uploader naming, actual content is April 2013 anti-nuclear march scene.)
• Nuclear Plant No. 4 (Longmen): 2023 Longmen Nuclear Power Plant, photography by Taiwankengo, CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Nuclear Plant No. 3 (Maanshan) Nanwan: Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant, Nanwan, photography by M. Weitzel, CC BY-SA 3.0.
• Lanyu Tao Traditional Underground House: Entrance of a traditional underground house of Tao people on Orchid Island, photography by othree, CC BY 2.0. Image shows Tao underground house settlement, used to present Lanyu's environmental justice context, not the low-level nuclear waste storage site itself.

References