A seemingly technical dispute over nuclear fuel rods has recently drawn public attention in Taiwan — but the real story is not about NT$4 billion in potential savings. It is about a fundamentally flawed energy policy that has cost Taiwan's public hundreds of times that amount, with the bill still rising.
The immediate controversy involves Yang Wei-fuu (楊偉甫), former chairman of Taiwan Power Company (Taipower), who argued in a recent interview that the uranium from fuel rods originally manufactured for the unfinished Lungmen Nuclear Power Plant — commonly known as Nuclear Plant No. 4 — could be reprocessed and used in fuel assemblies for Nuclear Plant No. 3, saving at least NT$4 billion in uranium procurement costs. Taipower pushed back, saying the fuel rod designs for the two plants are incompatible and that direct substitution is impossible.
Taipower's Rebuttal Misses the Point — and the Savings
On the narrow technical point, Taipower is correct: fuel rods from Nuclear Plant No. 4 cannot be inserted directly into the reactors at Nuclear Plants No. 2 or No. 3. But Yang's proposal was never about direct substitution. He suggested extracting the uranium from the Plant No. 4 assemblies and reprocessing it into new fuel rods compatible with Plant No. 3 — a meaningfully different proposition that Taipower's rebuttal does not actually address.
That approach is entirely feasible. When Plant No. 4 was mothballed, its 1,744 fuel rod assemblies were shipped to the United States for storage across seven separate transfers. Taipower has been trying to sell them ever since, but has found no buyers. Those assemblies remain under Taipower's ownership. Meanwhile, Taipower is now actively procuring new fuel rods for Plant No. 3, which it is aiming to restart by 2028. Given that uranium is the most valuable component in any fuel assembly — and that uranium prices have surged during the current global nuclear renaissance, likely at least doubling the market value of Taipower's stored inventory — the failure to consider reprocessing that uranium for Plant No. 3 demands a clear public explanation. Without one, the reasonable inference is either bureaucratic waste of at least NT$4 billion in public funds, or something worse.
The DPP's Nuclear-Free Policy Is Over. Excluding Plant No. 4 Has No Logical Basis.
The fuel rod question, however, is ultimately a secondary issue. The more consequential question is what Taiwan's government actually intends to do with Nuclear Plant No. 4 — and that question exposes the deeper incoherence of the Democratic Progressive Party's energy policy.
The DPP's "nuclear-free homeland" policy is, in practical terms, already dead. The government's decision to pursue restarting Nuclear Plants No. 2 and No. 3 is an implicit admission that abolishing nuclear power was a mistake. The claim that Taiwan achieved its nuclear-free goal in 2025 — technically accurate for a matter of months — is at best a face-saving formality and at worst a bad joke.
Once that reality is acknowledged, the continued exclusion of Nuclear Plant No. 4 becomes impossible to justify on any logical or technical basis. Plant No. 4 has a larger installed capacity than either Plant No. 2 or Plant No. 3, with an annual generation potential of approximately 20 billion kilowatt-hours — roughly 33 percent more than either of the other two plants individually. It is also a newer facility that was never placed into commercial operation. It strains credibility for the Ministry of Economic Affairs to argue that Plants No. 2 and No. 3 — both operating for over 40 years — can safely run for another two decades, while simultaneously treating the never-used, more modern Plant No. 4 as unsafe or unviable. No serious energy professional could say that with a straight face.
The honest explanation for Plant No. 4's continued exclusion is political: the DPP cannot bring itself to reverse a decades-old commitment that was the rallying cry of an earlier generation of anti-nuclear activists within its own coalition. But if Taiwan undergoes another change of government, that constraint disappears. Even under the current administration, the rational course is to preserve the Plant No. 4 fuel assemblies intact rather than strip their uranium for use elsewhere — because the plant itself should eventually be brought online. When Plant No. 4 was mothballed, it had not yet been completed; restarting it will require additional investment and time, making the decision to act sooner rather than later more urgent, not less.
Anti-Nuclear Policy Has Cost Taiwan's Ratepayers Over NT$1 Trillion — and Counting
Measured against the full scale of Taiwan's energy policy failure, the NT$4 billion fuel rod dispute barely registers. The true cost of the DPP's anti-nuclear turn runs into the trillions of New Taiwan dollars — and will continue accumulating for decades.
The arithmetic is straightforward. Nuclear Plants No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 together can generate approximately 40 billion kilowatt-hours per year; adding Plant No. 4 would bring that to 60 billion kilowatt-hours. Nuclear power is the lowest-cost generation source available, at an average of NT$1.42 per kilowatt-hour. The natural gas and renewable energy sources the DPP has expanded in its place cost between NT$3.50 and NT$6.00 per kilowatt-hour. The annual cost premium of abandoning nuclear — the amount Taiwanese ratepayers are overpaying every year — falls somewhere between NT$80 billion and NT$200 billion, depending on the specific assumptions used. Over a decade, that is well over NT$1 trillion.
A second measure arrives at a similar figure through a different route. The Tsai administration locked in 20-year guaranteed purchase prices for renewable energy developers in its rush to expand green power capacity. Independent analysts have calculated that this commitment will transfer more than NT$1 trillion in above-market costs to Taiwanese electricity consumers — effectively a long-term subsidy tax paid to private developers.
Against that backdrop, the NT$4 billion question over fuel rod reprocessing is almost too small to mention. The public debate that Taiwan actually needs — and that policymakers have so far avoided — is about the trillion-dollar consequences of a nuclear policy that was driven by ideology rather than evidence, and that will burden ratepayers for a generation to come.
Original Article in Chinese （Related： Taiwan's GDP Just Hit a 39-Year High. So Why Is Lai Ching-te's Approval Rating Underwater? ｜ Latest ）
