Premier Cho on Nuclear Power: Evasion Dressed as Deliberation

When Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) addressed Taiwan's legislature this week on nuclear energy and power policy, many observers took his remarks as a signal that the government is preparing to restart nuclear operations. A closer reading reveals something more familiar: carefully hedged political language designed to create the impression of movement while committing to nothing.

The Ministry of Economic Affairs is currently conducting what it calls a "self-commissioned safety review" of decommissioned nuclear plants, assessing the feasibility and cost of restart. Officials have periodically floated timelines — "as early as 2028," or perhaps 2030 — for restarting Unit 3 (or Unit 2) of various facilities. Against the backdrop of global energy anxiety driven in part by instability in the Middle East, these signals have fed growing speculation that President Lai Ching-te's (賴清德) administration has quietly decided to reverse course on nuclear power.

When lawmakers pressed Cho on how the government's previous non-nuclear energy mix would be adjusted given Lai's stated openness to "new nuclear energy," the premier answered that if nuclear plants cleared safety reviews and met the necessary conditions, the shares allocated to renewables and coal would be reconsidered accordingly. He affirmed that the Nuclear Safety Commission would review restart plans submitted by Taiwan Power Company to ensure they met "the highest safety standards."

He also restated the government's three preconditions for any nuclear restart: verified safety, a solution to nuclear waste disposal, and social consensus.

This is the language of conditions and contingencies, not policy. The media and political commentators who have concluded that the ruling Democratic Progressive Party has already decided to restart nuclear power are getting ahead of the facts.

Take Cho's "highest safety standards" formulation. It sounds reassuring, but it is not an operational policy benchmark — it is the kind of language favored by ideologues, not engineers or regulators. What, precisely, constitutes the "highest" safety standard? If it means 100 percent guaranteed safety, that standard has never existed anywhere in the history of nuclear power. Framing a technical and engineering question in those terms does not reflect a sophisticated grasp of industrial risk management; it reflects the vocabulary of activists, not policymakers.

To be clear: the global record of nuclear power, accumulated across hundreds of reactor-years of operation, demonstrates that it is a demonstrably safe, manageable, and reliable energy source. Taiwan's anti-nuclear movement was built largely on the demonization of that technology by people with little understanding of engineering or industrial safety — and the DPP absorbed that position uncritically.

Each of Cho's three preconditions is similarly problematic. On nuclear waste: with nearly 500 reactors currently operating worldwide, almost all of them in advanced economies, it is simply not credible to claim, as anti-nuclear advocates have long insisted, that nuclear waste poses an unsolvable, multigenerational catastrophe. Taiwan's specific difficulties with waste disposal are not a technical problem. They are a political one, manufactured and maintained by the same anti-nuclear movement that created the obstacles in the first place.

The "social consensus" precondition is, if anything, more troubling — because the data actively contradicts the premise. In the 2018 referendum on repealing the nuclear phase-out provisions of the Electricity Act, more than 54 percent of voters — nearly 5.9 million people — voted in favor of retaining nuclear power. Subsequent polling across multiple organizations has consistently shown that more than 60 percent of Taiwanese support keeping or restarting nuclear energy, with some surveys reaching nearly 70 percent. Support is highest among younger age groups.

For Cho to invoke "social consensus" as a condition still to be achieved — implying that a majority of Taiwanese remain committed to a nuclear-free homeland — is not merely inaccurate. It is a brazen lie. The consensus in favor of nuclear power already exists and has existed for years. Pretending otherwise is dishonest.

The government's decision to center the entire nuclear debate on the ongoing safety review is itself a misdirection. The implicit logic of that framing — that a safety review is necessary because Taiwan's nuclear plants were previously unsafe — is false. Taiwan's nuclear facilities operated safely for four to five decades. They were not closed because they were dangerous. They were closed to satisfy the DPP's ideological commitment to a nuclear-free Taiwan, a commitment that rested on a combination of mistaken assumptions and the global anti-nuclear mood of an earlier era.

That global mood has shifted decisively. The anti-nuclear movement has receded in most countries, and nuclear energy is increasingly embraced as a carbon-reduction tool. Taiwan's semiconductor industry and the explosive growth of AI-driven data centers have dramatically accelerated the island's electricity demand. Even so, the DPP proceeded with the decommissioning of nuclear capacity — and defended it.

What the Lai administration should do first is not commission more safety reviews. It should honestly reassess and revise its energy policy. Restarting nuclear power requires dismantling the nuclear-free homeland framework, because that framework — not safety — was always the reason for closing the plants. No amount of technical review changes that political reality.

But acknowledging this would mean admitting that a decade of energy policy was built on a flawed foundation, and accepting responsibility for the consequences. That is the admission the DPP is unwilling to make. That is why, whenever Cho Jung-tai speaks on nuclear energy, what follows is evasion dressed as deliberation.

（Related： Opinion | From Airstrikes to Ground Forces: Washington Weighs Its Options in Iran ｜ Latest ）

​