Taiwan's President William Lai announced on Friday that nuclear reactors at the island's second and third power plants meet the conditions for restart, with state utility Taiwan Power Company having initiated procedures to bring the units back online.
The economics ministry concluded after careful assessment that the two facilities are technically fit for reactivation, Lai said at a business association event. Taiwan Power is expected to submit a restart plan to the Nuclear Safety Commission for review by the end of the month.
The announcement reignites a debate over nuclear power that has divided Taiwan for years — and that has its parallel in capitals around the world, where governments have spent decades wrestling with whether to extend, abandon or revive atomic energy programs.
Nuclear Renaissance, Part One: Forty Years in the Wilderness
This series began by comparing nuclear energy to a crown prince — full of youthful promise, then forced into decades of exile by a coalition of powerful adversaries, before finally returning to reclaim a dominant position when circumstances shifted. （Related： Opinion | The KMT’s Real Crisis Lies Within ｜ Latest ）
This is not mere metaphor. Of the 94 nuclear reactors currently operating in the United States, only two — recently commissioned AP1000 units representing Generation 3.5 technology — are modern designs. All others are aging Generation 2 reactors.
The leap directly from Generation 2 to 3.5 was not a deliberate commercial strategy, comparable to Apple skipping iPhone model numbers. It reflects a 40-year freeze in American nuclear development. That stagnation extended from industry into academia: Taiwan's only nuclear engineering department was renamed "Engineering and Systems Science" roughly 30 years ago, a title that obscures its origins.
In the early 2000s, a Republican administration briefly declared a "nuclear renaissance." That momentum collapsed under President Barack Obama, whose administration effectively blocked new nuclear development. Westinghouse, the industry's flagship company, subsequently filed for bankruptcy. It was not until Donald Trump's political return — combined with the rise of artificial intelligence and the global push toward net-zero emissions —that conditions finally emerged for us to open this series of discussions.
Here's the thing — if you want to understand where nuclear power is going, you've got to understand where it's been. We're talking forty years in the wilderness. So grab a seat, because we're breaking this down movie-recap style. （Related： Opinion | The KMT’s Real Crisis Lies Within ｜ Latest ）
A Former Pillar of Energy Security
The atomic bombs that ended World War II demonstrated the technology's destructive potential and triggered a lasting moral debate among scientists and intellectuals. J. Robert Oppenheimer, widely known as the "father of the atomic bomb," became an early advocate for nuclear weapons controls.
Yet among the general public, nuclear technology initially carried a different connotation — one of modernity and scientific progress. Consumer products branded with atomic imagery were fashionable across the postwar decades. Products branded with atomic imagery — from atomic pens and atomic-themed clothing to the beloved cartoon character Astro Boy — were the must-have items of the era, outselling even today's K-pop merchandise.
By the 1980s, nuclear power had become a cornerstone of energy supply. Commonwealth Edison, then the largest utility in Chicago, derived more than half its electricity from nuclear plants. The engineering firm Sargent and Lundy was a leading employer for civil engineers, sustained by a backlog of orders placed during the 1970s construction boom.
The Cultural Shift: From Admiration to Opposition
As the era of anti-war protest, hippie counterculture, rock and heavy metal of the 1960s and 1970s took hold, environmental awareness rose, and opposition to nuclear weapons began spilling over into opposition to nuclear power. （Related： Opinion | The KMT’s Real Crisis Lies Within ｜ Latest ）
At the height of Cold War nuclear tension, the prospect of mutually assured destruction between the United States and Soviet Union fueled the largest anti-nuclear demonstration in history: an estimated one million people marched in New York in 1982. A broad coalition of environmental, medical, and peace organizations coalesced around demands for nuclear disarmament and a fundamental reassessment of civilian nuclear power.
The nuclear weapons dimension of that debate — bound up in national security and nonproliferation policy — lies beyond the scope of this analysis.
Three Disasters That Defined the Freeze
In March 1979, a partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania became the most serious nuclear accident in American history — rated Level 5 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The accident originated in failures of non-nuclear systems combined with operator error. Although independent assessments found no significant measurable impact on the surrounding environment, the event severely damaged public confidence and triggered a wave of new regulatory requirements.
In April 1986, reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Soviet Union exploded catastrophically, releasing massive quantities of radioactive material across Europe and killing dozens of workers directly. Millions more were exposed to elevated radiation levels. The accident was rated Level 7 — the maximum on the international scale. （Related： Opinion | The KMT’s Real Crisis Lies Within ｜ Latest ）
The RBMK-1000 reactor design already carried well-documented structural safety deficiencies. During a cooling experiment, nexperienced supervisors overrode trained operators, violating multiple safety protocols: they first disabled the automatic shutdown system — effectively pulling the fuse — then ran the reactor at a dangerously unstable low-power state.
The resulting uncontrolled chain reaction produced an explosion estimated at more than 400 times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
In March 2011, Japan's most powerful earthquake on record — magnitude 9.1 — struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The facility survived the initial seismic event. However, the 40-meter tsunami that followed approximately 50 minutes later destroyed all onsite and offsite power sources, disabling the reactor cooling systems.
Core meltdowns occurred in multiple reactors, followed by several hydrogen explosions that breached the containment structures. The accident was also classified at Level 7.
The first major accident occurred in the United States, a country that had grown complacent after decades without serious incidents. The second unfolded in the Soviet Union, where poor reactor design and a dismissive attitude toward safety culture played decisive roles.
The third, however, happened in Japan — a technologically advanced, highly disciplined society — and that fact, analysts argue, shook global confidence in nuclear power more profoundly than either of the previous disasters. （Related： Opinion | The KMT’s Real Crisis Lies Within ｜ Latest ）
Unpacking Fukushima's Structural Failures
Fukushima Daiichi was a product of the 1970s nuclear expansion, housing six Generation 2 boiling water reactors of American design. Following Three Mile Island, U.S. nuclear operators implemented a range of safety improvements — including measures to manage hydrogen buildup. Japanese operators, according to industry accounts, dismissed these upgrades as unnecessary.
Japan has long experience with tsunamis — the word itself originates from Japanese. Yet because tsunami risk is far less significant in the United States, American reactor designs emphasized seismic protection but paid less attention to tsunami barriers. Fukushima's coastal site had been partially excavated to facilitate seawater intake. Several internal reports had recommended raising the tsunami seawall, but those proposals were rejected on cost grounds.
The plant's engineering also centralized instrumentation and electrical systems for all six reactors in a single shared facility — a design choice that reduced costs and staffing requirements but critically undermined system redundancy. Had independent, separated backup systems been installed, the overall safety margin would have been substantially higher.
The reactor cooling systems, which require continuous electrical power to operate, faced an unprecedented total blackout — both internal and external power were lost simultaneously. Emergency diesel generators were flooded and rendered inoperable. Battery backups sustained cooling for approximately three days. （Related： Opinion | The KMT’s Real Crisis Lies Within ｜ Latest ）
When external power was eventually restored, operators discovered that the incoming electricity used a different standard — western Japan's American-derived 60-Hz system was incompatible with eastern Japan's German-derived 50-Hz infrastructure, a legacy of the post-Sino-Japanese War period. Cooling remained insufficient, meltdowns proceeded, and hydrogen accumulation eventually ruptured the containment structures — the very structures touted as an impenetrable iron fortress.
The human and institutional failures at Fukushima were extensive, nuclear safety experts have noted. The accident extended the nuclear winter by another decade and prompted several countries to accelerate plans to phase out nuclear power entirely. The irony, widely noted in subsequent assessments, is that the accident itself produced no direct casualties attributable to radiation exposure. The earthquake and tsunami, by contrast, killed nearly 20,000 people and displaced more than 160,000 residents.
The Return: Yucca Mountain and a New Political Climate
With a Republican administration back in power in Washington, the long-stalled Yucca Mountain Project (YMP) — a multi-decade, estimated USD 100 billion program to create a permanent underground repository for high-level nuclear waste in Nevada — has formally resumed. The return of nuclear policy as a political priority has made trained nuclear professionals scarce and highly sought after in an industry that had seen a generation of talent drain away. （Related： Opinion | The KMT’s Real Crisis Lies Within ｜ Latest ）
Under the statutory framework, back-end nuclear waste management is the responsibility of the Department of Energy (DOE), funded by a levy on nuclear power revenue flowing into a dedicated waste fund, with regulatory oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The challenge of permanent disposal is without precedent: the United States has both the world's largest stockpile of civilian nuclear waste and among the strongest anti-nuclear political constituencies.
The engineering consortium that won the DOE contract spent six years — through repeated reorganizations, technical reviews, and legal challenges — before completing a safety analysis report and submitting a construction license application. Progress had been substantial when the political landscape shifted abruptly.
The incoming Obama administration appointed prominent nuclear opponents to lead both the DOE and the NRC. The DOE submitted a budget proposal to Congress that zeroed out Yucca Mountain funding and eliminated the relevant program office.
The NRC chair declared, before any formal review had concluded, that he would not approve Yucca Mountain's funding. The Senate Majority Leader publicly declared that Yucca Mountain would be approved only over his dead body. Under coordinated pressure from both the executive and legislative branches, the project was effectively shut down. （Related： Opinion | The KMT’s Real Crisis Lies Within ｜ Latest ）
Now, with Trump's political return and a convergence of factors — including artificial intelligence-driven electricity demand and international net-zero commitments — nuclear energy is again under serious policy consideration. Whether nuclear energy can finally reach its promised land remains to be seen. In the next installment, we turn to the technical roadmap for nuclear fission.
Note 1: Control systems at large nuclear plants are highly complex. During the decades of rapid expansion, complacency set in and emergency response procedures were reduced to operator manuals. Reactor operators were required to have only a high school diploma, with at most two years of college-level training. When the Three Mile Island accident occurred — before digital reference tools or AI-assisted diagnostics — operators scrambled through thick printed manuals searching for guidance that did not exist, because the failure mode they encountered had not been anticipated or documented. （Related： Opinion | The KMT’s Real Crisis Lies Within ｜ Latest ）
Note 2: Shutting down a nuclear reactor means terminating the fission chain reaction, but the decay heat from fission products remains intense for an extended period: approximately 3.5% of full operating power after one minute, halving roughly every several hours over subsequent days. Active cooling is therefore required for a substantial time after shutdown to prevent the core from overheating. Even spent fuel must remain submerged in cooling pools for approximately five years before it can be transferred to dry cask storage. Cooling system integrity is therefore considered the single most critical safety factor in nuclear plant design.
Note 3: The United States has permanently shut down 41 nuclear reactors to date — 17 of first-generation design, the remainder second-generation. Twelve reactors were closed within the decade following the Fukushima disaster alone. Decommissioning utilities had already paid into government-managed waste funds, but the government has failed to fulfill its disposal obligations. Since 1998, more than 70 breach-of-contract lawsuits have been filed against the DOE. Confirmed government liability payments to utilities have already exceeded USD 10 billion; total exposure, if the government continues to default, is estimated to exceed USD 50 billion — representing more than half of the total waste fund. The high-level waste (HLW) requiring containment over geological timescales includes 93,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from civilian reactors, which accounts for 95% of total radioactivity. Defense-related HLW — generated by weapons programs dating to World War II — includes approximately 90 million gallons of liquid waste and 2,500 metric tons of solid material. All of this was originally intended for permanent disposal at Yucca Mountain. （Related： Opinion | The KMT’s Real Crisis Lies Within ｜ Latest ）
Note 4: Yucca Mountain was not only an undertaking of extraordinary financial scale but also one of the most technically demanding engineering projects in nuclear history. The safety analysis report — the professional and regulatory core of the license application — employed probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) throughout, quantifying risks to the public and environment with the aim of demonstrating compliance with strict acceptance criteria. Beyond ensuring safe operation of the repository for its operational lifetime, the project was required to demonstrate environmental protection over what regulators defined as a one-million-year compliance period — a timeframe that exceeds the entire recorded history of Homo sapiens by more than threefold. Groundwater contamination concerns led to extended litigation reaching the federal appeals courts. After the license application was submitted, the project team worked closely with the NRC's technical review staff to respond to queries and revisions. The NRC's own safety evaluation, when eventually released, had portions of text redacted — including conclusions that did not align with the political position of the commission's leadership at the time.
About the Author | Wang Xiaozhong (王曉中)
Wang Xiaozhong holds a degree in civil engineering from National Taiwan University and a doctoral degree in environmental engineering and radiation science from Northwestern University. Over a career spanning more than 40 years across industry, government, academia, and research, he has served as a visiting expert at Taiwan's Atomic Energy Council, as head of the Science Division at the National Science Council's Chicago office, as executive secretary of the Council's Environmental and Development Committee, and as a nuclear safety expert at the U.S. National Academies and within the American nuclear industry. He has taught at National Taiwan University, National Cheng Kung University, and several other institutions. A former editor-in-chief of multiple science and technology publications, he received the inaugural Science Popular Literature Award from the National Science Council.
This article is republished with permission fromGreen Impact Academy (original title: Nuclear Renaissance, Part One: Forty Years in the Wilderness).
（Related：
Opinion | The KMT’s Real Crisis Lies Within
｜
Latest
）
