Taiwan's nuclear-free status turned one year old this week. There is little to celebrate. What was billed as a historic milestone for the Democratic Progressive Party and its allied environmental groups has quietly become an admission of failure — and an extraordinarily expensive one for Taiwanese ratepayers.
A Milestone Built on Borrowed Time
At 10 p.m. on May 17, 2025, Unit 2 of the Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant (核三廠) was disconnected from the grid, bringing Taiwan's nuclear output to zero. For the DPP, which had pursued a nuclear-free Taiwan for decades, the moment represented a long-promised deliverable to its base. For the broader public, it marked the beginning of an avoidable financial burden.
The anniversary has generated little enthusiasm even among anti-nuclear groups. Several environmental organizations gathered recently to urge President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) not to reverse course. Their concern reflects a political reality: the Lai administration has already decided to restart nuclear operations. President Lai has cited four justifications for the restart; the Ministry of Economic Affairs is now conducting the required preparatory work, safety inspections, and procedural reviews, with officials pointing toward a 2028 target and Taiwan Power Company accelerating procurement of nuclear fuel rods.
The nuclear-free era, in other words, was over before it began. The moment Maanshan Unit 2 went offline, the structural problems with sustaining a non-nuclear grid were already visible. What followed was always going to be a brief political interlude, not a permanent transformation of Taiwan's energy system.
The Cost of a Political Face-Saving Exercise
Why did Taiwan complete full de-nuclearization if the end destination was always a return to nuclear power? The answer is political rather than economic. The DPP needed to demonstrate to its anti-nuclear base that it had honored decades of promises — what might be called, in the bluntest terms, a face-saving exercise pursued regardless of whether the underlying energy economics justified it.
For the more than 60% of Taiwanese citizens who polls consistently show support nuclear power, this exercise has amounted to a significant financial disaster. The costs of manufacturing a temporary nuclear-free Taiwan are now becoming fully apparent.
The Arithmetic of Replacing Cheap Power
The numbers are not complicated. Nuclear power generates electricity at an average cost of NT$1.42 per kilowatt-hour — the cheapest source available to Taiwan. Coal and gas generation runs NT$3.43 to NT$3.44 per kilowatt-hour or more. Renewable energy purchased from private developers costs NT$5 to NT$6.50 per kilowatt-hour — several times the nuclear rate.
The three retired plants generated substantial output. Maanshan's two units together produced approximately 15 billion kilowatt-hours per year. The Kuosheng plant (核二廠) matched that figure. The older Chinshan plant (核一廠) contributed roughly 10 billion kilowatt-hours annually.
Replacing Maanshan's output alone with gas and renewables increases the per-kilowatt-hour cost by NT$2 to NT$3. That substitution adds NT$30 billion to NT$45 billion to Taiwan's annual electricity bill. If the restart is not achieved until 2028 as planned, the cumulative added cost over three years reaches NT$90 billion to NT$135 billion — before accounting for the additional hundreds of billions needed to prepare a plant for restart after premature retirement.
Maanshan had operated reliably for 40 years. Without the unnecessary cycle of early shutdown and eventual restart, those costs would simply not exist.
The Public Voted Against This Policy — and Was Overruled
The damage extends well beyond Maanshan. By 2021, when the Kuosheng plant began its decommissioning process, the failures of the nuclear-free policy were already apparent to any informed observer. They did not stop the DPP.
Nor did the results of a public referendum. On November 24, 2018 — weeks before Chinshan Unit 1 was taken offline — Taiwan held a vote on the "nuclear power for green energy" (以核養綠) proposition, which called for repealing the statutory requirement that all nuclear plants cease operations by 2025. The measure passed with 5.89 million votes, a majority. The result was a clear public mandate to retain nuclear power as part of the energy mix. The Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) administration chose to treat it as non-binding and continued decommissioning on schedule.
Had the DPP reversed course after that referendum — acknowledging the public's judgment and revising its energy policy — Taiwan would have been spared the full cost of this detour. Instead, the country completed the transition and is now paying to undo it. Calculated from the beginning of the decommissioning process, replacing nuclear output with more expensive alternatives has cost Taiwan more than NT$80 billion per year at conservative price differentials. By the time nuclear power is restored, the cumulative cost to ratepayers will likely fall between NT$300 billion and NT$500 billion.
Why the Penghu Comparison Fails
Anti-nuclear groups, in urging the Lai administration not to restart, have pointed to the outlying Penghu Islands as a model — citing Penghu's progress toward 100% renewable energy as evidence that Taiwan can do the same. The comparison does not hold.
Nearly 60% of Taiwan's electricity consumption is industrial. Manufacturing and commercial services each account for roughly 20% more. Penghu has no energy-intensive industry whatsoever. Its total annual electricity consumption is approximately 400 million kilowatt-hours. A single TSMC 5-nanometer fabrication plant on the main island consumes 6 billion to 7 billion kilowatt-hours per year — more than the entire eastern region of Taiwan. Invoking Penghu's renewable transition as a blueprint for powering Taiwan's industrial economy is not an argument; it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the scale involved.
A Policy That Delivered Waste and Scandal in Equal Measure
There is a phrase widely used in Taiwan: a mistaken policy causes more harm than corruption. The nuclear-free anniversary becoming a quiet day of reckoning is a textbook illustration. What makes this policy particularly damning is that it does not force a choice between the two failures — it has delivered both. Alongside the enormous financial cost of the energy transition, Taiwan has witnessed a series of corruption scandals involving renewable energy contracts and politically connected developers. No politician and no party has been held accountable for either the policy failure or the procurement irregularities that accompanied it.
The path forward is to correct the mistake as quickly as possible, so that Taiwanese ratepayers do not absorb one more year of unnecessary costs than is absolutely required.
