Taiwan is heading toward an energy crunch?
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Once another party takes over, the nukes will likely be fired up. Taiwan can make all the power it needs.
The anti-nuclear sentiment is more due to the age/state of the reactors and concerns over earthquake safety after the Fukushima nuclear accident and the inability for the island to store/handle/dispose of waste.
I don't think the state of nuclear power will change much even if the blues gain power. Taiwanese politics has a way of making the minority party always be against the status quo for some issues just to be a pain for the majority party, and their stance on nuclear power tends to flip flop depending on who's in power.
The nuclear program in Taiwan was heavily tied to the KMT's ambitions, and as a result Taiwan's anti-nuclear movement is heavily tied to Taiwan's pro-democracy movement which became the DPP, along with the MASSIVE beating nuclear power took all over Asia after the Fukushima disaster (which imo was overhyped in Chinese language media).
Politically speaking, Taiwan under authoritarian KMT rule was in a fairly similar spot to China today, and most of the significant gains that Taiwan saw happened after Taiwan democratized.
That said, anti-nuclear sentiment is equally strong in Mainland China as well, and aside from flashy tech demonstrations, the PRC prefers to use a mix of more politically palatable coal and renewables.
Finally, it is the 1980s-90s generation that is currently in power in Taiwan, and has been for a decade now. Anti-nuclear sentiment will remain for the foreseeable future [0]
Taiwan: 0.02 Billion people, GDP ranking: Not even top 10, location: literally part of China.
How do you see the future playing out where China doesn't get to do what it likes to Taiwan? It is all but set in stone at this point, literally the only path Taiwan has to get a good outcome is to negotiate it with China. We've seen in Ukraine what will happen to them if they rely on the US in a military way. There will be mass deaths, the island will be levelled and China will likely seize control anyway.
I wouldn't want the CCP seizing control, but a policy of serious independence is being taken off the table due to China's sheer size. There isn't a backer available to Taiwan that is big enough to stop the mainland from getting what it wants. War is pointless for Taiwan; they'd even be better off going out Hong-Kong style.
if Taiwan carried out its former plan of using nuclear power stations to build the bomb it wouldn't have to worry about China again (or fickle US support)
Ukraine is fighting Russia without other nation's armies directly joining them. Taiwan's allies have most of the globe's naval power.
Large empires tend to lose through military victories and bad economic strategy.
As for the actual practical situation: Sailing enough troops to conquer Taiwan across 90 miles of ocean, to land on a very small number of workable beaches, that have been known to be the only workable beaches for decades and therefore have highly prepared defenses... yeah, that's not something that China is guaranteed success at. Xi has looked at what happened to Russia, and may be less certain of Taiwan rolling over, and less certain of success.
So no, it's not inevitable. Stop counseling despair.
But you have to be intelligent about it in other circumstances, and consider whether it’s actually worth throwing your life away, if the enemy isn’t genoicidally murderous like the Germans under the Nazi party.
Consider African Americans under Jim Crow laws — should they have fought violently? That only would have led to them murdered, even potentially in large numbers. African Americans have survived in the U.S. and not been mass murdered partially due to not fighting (and also by moving to more hospitable areas during the Great Migration).
To quote https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...:
>It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle. He thought about fighting. “Just be quiet,” his father told him. “Because they’ll come and kill us all.”
Basically don’t fight the enemy that’s enslaving you, unless you’re strong enough to win; otherwise you endanger suffering ethnic cleansing / genocide of your people.
If there is a choice, sure. If there isn't a choice, then living is also a good option. Losing liberty isn't a reason to commit suicide.
> Stop counseling despair.
What despair? Why would Taiwan have to despair? China already controls something like 10% of the human race, the 10% that has seen the biggest improvement in living standards over the last 50 years.
Signing up with that would be unpleasant. But it seems like a better option than a war with the world's greatest industrial superpower that Taiwan is quite likely to lose. We've had a bunch of countries choose war with the US and they'd almost uniformly have been better off surrendering and arguing for liberty in a diplomatic way.
What is certain that if they do, and the PRC blinks (does not invade), the PRC's government will suffer from massive loss of face.
So again, no. The KMT is not the anti war / friendliness party. It’s the party in favor of letting China seize everything.
Refusing to spread your butt cheeks against an imperialistic nation’s ambitions is not “pro war”.
"Fast forward to the present day, and the energy battle lines have not much shifted, with most pro-nuclear advocates also representing the Kuomintang (KMT), the party of Chiang Kai-shek and whose candidate drew just 39% of the vote in the 2020 presidential race. Meanwhile, the DPP, which has grown to become dominant, remains heavily anti-nuclear. Over time, the distinctions on nuclear have become less about anti- or pro-authoritarianism; rather, the DPP is widely seen as the young, pro-environment party, while the KMT is seen as pro-business (and, paradoxically given its origins, too cozy with China). This leaves very little political space to advocate for nuclear energy on the premises of eco-modernist environmentalism."
Ok. That's gets me there. The pressure is coming from environmentalists -- imbued with the unassailable virtue -- so any discussion of the matter carefully conceals the prevailing parties and positions and names go unnamed, by both journalists and the participants in this thread. Exactly what I suspected.
[1] https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-18-fall-2022/taiwans-...
It’s actually the gas lobbyists. They push an all renewables-no-nukes agenda. Which works in theory. But in practice, there aren’t enough panels and batteries being produced. So the gap is filled with gas.
The promise is that infrastructure will be phased out. But Europe has already invested over €1.5tn into new gas infrastructure. Those are 1.5tn reasons not to decommission it. We had a choice between nukes and gas, and the gas lobby convinced us it was a fight between coal (already on its deathbed) and solar panels.
Green parties convinced people wind and solar would suffice. Now the net can't deal with the peaks and throughs. Here in the NL already one of our biggest tech companies is not opening a new datacenter because of lack of electricity available. We used to laugh at countries not having enough power...
Might've wanted to consider upgrading the grid during those 14 years. Not like the need for an energy transition hasn't been known for decades.
It's very difficult to separate the two given that the 80s-90s generation is in power in Taiwan.
This is not a scenario most plants are remotely vulnerable to. It's reasonable to ask if peoples' worries about a Fukushima repeat are grounded in reality.
There are countless black swan events that are exacerbated by having nuclear around.
On the "generating reliable power for a country" scale, everything is a tradeoff. There is no perfect solution that just works with no downside, especially in geographically challenged countries such as Japan.
But alas, our politicians are short sited, our companies lack the willingness to make it happen. It feels like a massively missed opportunity.
Actually we have heaps of fairly reasonable sized solar farms both built and operating and also in development right now. The politics your talking about is actually just that...politics. It's the optics of opposition. We are cranking out solar and approving decent sized installs all the time. The opposition just likes to make it out like their is kickback and it's not happening in order to back up their own political view and make themselves feel good.
Business on the other hand is churning on with rolling it out and making bank from it.
And, it's not like TSMC is using electricity clandestinely: they're a fantastically profitable business probably buying electricity wholesale. So, stop the stupid handwringing and expand production.
However unlike nuclear you can toss solar just about anywhere there’s a little land or even a lake. Nuclear needs lot contiguous space with access to water for cooling and big reservoirs for safety etc.
France recently went weeks with every single nuclear power plant in the country offline, but the system was designed to cope with such downtime.
At the beginning you can get great uptime but eventually you face years like this: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure2...
Of those 56 reactors in the entire of 2021 no more than 49 where on online at any time in the same day. 90% of the time it was 46 or less. 16% of days it was 36 or less bottoming out at 28, and everything didn’t suddenly start working in 2022.
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure2...
That’s the reality of “dependable” nuclear power, it wants to run 24/7 but can’t run 365.
A rooftop of solar will produce enough energy for multiple households easily. The main constraints is storage.
Geopolitical threats aside, I imagine floating a farm would be the least of challenges[1].
[1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/80/1/1520-04...
Last year, TSMC used 25,000GWh, or 12.5% of Taiwan's electricity, so a 10GW solar project like stated above will take care of it.
If you need dollar figures: Chinese PV prices have dropped to 10 cents/watt while LFP cells are down to $53/kwh. So, $1b will get you 10GW worth of panels, while $4.4b will get you 8 hours of storage. So, roughly $10b to completely go off grid.
So why did Russia stop delivering gas via Nord Stream 1 from 09/2022 on (before the sabotage)?
The Russians are managing to bypass restrictions to some degree using their “dark fleet” but that’s oil, and hardly a case of Europe continuing as if nothing were.
One of them, still active until this December when the contract ends, is through Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_Russia%E2%80...
First result is a detailed page from the European Union, showing amongst others a diagram that EU imports from Russia were divided by three.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/eu-gas-suppl...
Of course the EU could lie, but that seems unlikely. It could also be that Russia is selling to the EU without the EU knowing it. For oil that is almost certainly the case to some extent. For LNG you need very specific infrastructure (boats, terminals) that are not compatible with the famous “dark fleet”.
Russia is probably selling the gaz to someone else, or at least trying to. But in that case at a discounted price and with less margin because pipelines cannot be improvised, so they have to use more expensive means of transport.
Mind you those figures were 2023 and they will have reduced even more most likely. But Europe is still buying gaz to some extent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park
https://globalsolaratlas.info/map
Edit: nvm it's not the biggest anymore, but still you need at least 2x to 3x the area to get to 10gw and that's with much better settings that's what Taiwan offers
I also wonder if building for typhoon conditions affects construction costs significantly.
$10b seems impossibly low to go fully off-grid, I expect real estate costs would dwarf panel/battery/construction costs. TSMC isn't stupid, so I assume they've explored the options in this area.
So that means in the US you can use renovables and the same space needs to satisfy the demand of 17 times less people than in Taiwan. In other words: it doesn't make any sense in Taiwan.
Also It doesn't make any sense to close your nuclear plants, specially when China could invade you any day of the week and destroy anything you have offshore in hours.
if the US abandons Ukraine support after two years, it would mean that it will abandon Taiwan too. Nuclear deterrent is real.
Otherwise, what do you suggest they do? Nothing? Or keep hand-wringing with articles like this?
Solar panels are by definition easy to see and thus knock out remotely.
> what do you suggest they do
Nukes. We’ve seen from Ukraine that they’re given special status even in war.
If i were an adversary I'd much rather my enemy source everything from a single NPP than hundreds of square km of solar.
If you're America, yes. If you're an island nation defending against China one hundred and ten miles away, you don't have the air defence resources to protect your entire island. (And they do have the resources to knock hout hundreds of square kilometres of solar.)
So are PLAN landing sites. (They’re all in the south.)
Can you show an existence proof of someone spinning up gigawatts of energy overnight?
And solar doesn't help with night time and batteries haven't hit giagawatt scale yet, you might be a bit over your skiis with your claim here.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
The report is here: https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/...
From the article:
> “The problem with solar in Taiwan is that we don’t have a big area. We have the same population as Australia and use the same amount of electricity, but we are only half the size of Tasmania, and 79 percent of Taiwan is mountainous, so land acquisition is difficult.” Rooftop solar is expensive, and roof space is sometimes needed for other things, such as helicopter pads, public utilities, or water tanks.
the whole country is people living in 10 story apartment buildings. Taiwan looks like this[1], not like suburban Texas where everyone lives in 2k square feet mansions. The very limited roof space/dweller ratio you have in a country like this is indeed used for water storage, helicopter pads, what have you. If you're in a country so sparsely populated where home's are so large that a house can power itself with solar maybe roof solar makes some difference, in a place where you can slap 2 solar panels on a building of 300 people it really doesn't.
[1]https://img.static-kl.com/images/media/54842792-60B3-4C6E-A9...
There’s a lot to care about wrt Taiwan, I will say.
The ego on display in the programming world is just astonishing.
The reason Taiwan is valuable is because they are allowed to import western tech that China is not allowed to have, and the labor is somehow cheaper there to operate it.
Labor costs constitute just 5-10% of cutting-edge chips fabs like those operated by TSMC. The company’s operating profit margin is around 40%.
If it were just labor costs, there’d already be such fabs in several countries given how strategically important chips are in modern life and national security.
Without the equipment from ASML, Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing would be nothing, we wouldn't even be talking about them - they wouldn't be "operating the most advanced chip fabs in the world". The fact is, the high-tech of Taiwan is imported. While they may have smart people in Taiwan, they were not the ones who created this advanced tech.
Labor costs absolutely do have a lot to do with why these fabs are located in Taiwan, as well as other lower costs than in the U.S. due to regulations and everything that comes with running manufacturing in the U.S.
But my point stands that Taiwan imports their semiconductor fab equipment, as well as their power generation facilities. It's a small island, there's only so much that they can build there. Just because an island can produce advanced semiconductors does not mean they have the capability to build power stations themselves.
By the same token, ASML wouldn’t be where they are without advanced components from other countries.
In today's world, no country is the most advanced in every tech.
> The reason Taiwan is valuable is because they are allowed to import western tech that China is not allowed to have, and the labor is somehow cheaper there to operate it.
ASML can export to many countries. Why can't any other country in the West or which is a Western ally afford to subsidize the 5-10% extra profit margin for labor costs and successfully build a similarly advanced fab like TSMC's for strategic reasons and to make significant profits as well?
Regarding nuclear power plants, they might not currently have the capability because it's not their priority to develop it, and they can quite easily hire companies from other countries to build them. Comparative advantage and all that.
If a party has been anti-nuclear for decades, they won't change their stance even in the face of reality, and regardless of the actual facts and arguments.
People sharing ideas here is just a waste of time. People are smart in Taiwan and can come up with the solutions themselves.
The problems have to be elsewhere. They’re not lacking smart ideas for sure.
Edit: I’m downvoted but this isn’t even a topic in Taiwan. They don’t have power issues. This is just a rubbish article.
On another note, now that Anandtech is closed are you still writing for any other website?