Taiwan has 4 nuclear plants that IIRC they've chosen to not run *purely for political reasons*. The (imo crazy and crooked-as-hell) "green party" is currently in power).
Once another party takes over, the nukes will likely be fired up. Taiwan can make all the power it needs.
Setting aside the "blue green" matter, the question remains: what exactly are the "political reasons" at play here. That phrase raises my suspicions. Which party, what is their alignment and what is their problem with nuclear power?
Green is the independent Taiwan/nationalist party. Blue is the anti-war/friendliness with China party.
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.
It's nowhere near that straightforward. The party in question is the Kuomintang (KMT), who fought against the CCP in the civil war and founded the Taiwanese state. However, their position matches the PRC's in that there is "one China", and they assert that the Green/independence movement will break the status quo and basically force the PRC to invade.
The PRC has repeatedly stated that a declaration of independence by Taiwan would amount to an act of war and they would be "forced" to invade to stop it. Obviously the forcing is in quotes, because it's just the PRC forcing itself, but the PRC has painted itself into a corner here and nobody has dared to call their bluff yet.
It isn't a question of whether China would win, it is the certainty that Taiwan would lose. And regardless, that isn't the reason why large empires are unstable. Through history big countries tend to win but large agglomerations tend to dissolve for economic concerns. That is what happened in the largest imperial dissolutions in history (British, Mongols) which weren't because of a defeat by an external power or because they had any trouble conquering small powers. Or the most recent with things like the USSR.
Large empires tend to lose through military victories and bad economic strategy.
> How do you see the future playing out where China doesn't get to do what it likes to Taiwan?
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)
I take it you're not a fan of the expression "Live free or die". But not everyone agrees with you. Some understand why "liberty or death" is actually a reasonable way to live and die - that liberty is in fact worth fighting and dying for. Because if you're not willing to fight for liberty, sooner or later someone will make you either fight or become a slave, and if you won't fight, slavery is all that's left.
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.
> Some understand why "liberty or death" is actually a reasonable way to live and die
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.
With regards to “live free or die”, I’d say it only makes sense if the enemy want to genocide you. Like in the case of the Nazis, I would say fighting them is best (if you’re not “aryan”), since they’d murder you anyways.
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).
>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.
It really makes sense for the DPP (Green) to be anti-nuclear. Mainland China is using Westinghouse AP1000 designs from the US for their nuke plants. Taiwan is friendlier with the US and can get a nice discount to license the same AP1000..
The DPP isn't anti-nuclear for strategic reasons - it's anti-nuclear for ideological reasons.
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]
One of those "purely political reasons" being the obvious and real risks involved with having nuclear power plants in an area known for large earthquakes which was made especially real in people's minds after Fukushima ( further down in the same page you linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Taiwan#Post-F... )
A significant portion of Taiwan grew up during authoritarian rule, and the anti-nuclear movement was heavily tied to the democracy movement of the 1980s-90s - especially because CKS tied his own ambitions to nuclear capacity - both for energy and potentially weapons.
It's very difficult to separate the two given that the 80s-90s generation is in power in Taiwan.
What was real was that a bad design that the company operating the plant was warned about repeatedly, survived an earthquake, but didn't survive a tsunami. As a result, there was an evacuation. And nobody died from anything directly related to the power plant itself, only due to the evacuation. Multiple times more people died in an oil tank fire in another city due to the same earthquake+tsunami. And during its lifetime Fukushima saved countless lives by not emitting air pollution.
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.
Fukushima was perfectly fine after the earthquake. The tsunami is what provoked the accident by knocking out the backup generators.
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.
> Oil lobbyists infiltrated the gullible greens and convinced them that gas and oil are better than nuclear
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...
Unbelievable that you're saying this when the last 14 years have seen the same party in power, who throughout that entire period have ran on a platform with little in common with "the greens". It's like as if the Reps had been in power for 14 years straight in the US, and you'd still find a way to blame the Dems for a nation-level issue.
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.
I really wish australia would get into silicon foundry and semiconductor manufacturing businesses. We have the space, we have the geo stability ( lots of our space is really old and very stable from a geological standpoint...it finished moving yonks ago), we produce most of the precursor compinents in their raw forms in absolute masses or have the capacity and resources to do so and we also have the political stability.
But alas, our politicians are short sited, our companies lack the willingness to make it happen. It feels like a massively missed opportunity.
But then Australia is a country where getting Solar Power with such a vast space is difficult due to all sort of political reasons doesn't seems very friendly to all the manufacturing requirement for modern Foundry.
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.
We got more coastline available that you can poke a stick at, much like the greenhouses next to the nullabor in south aus you just solar desalination your water and we have a near infinite supply of water available.
I love how everyone on this thread is giving energy advice to the country that "makes the world's computer chips". Surely they have a couple of smart people on that island…
In democracies (or any other government type other than the theoretical technocracy) smart people don't necessarily get to make decisions. Political considerations and dumb voters have to be taken into account.
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.
I reckon that solar chips are approaching potato chips in terms of (relative to CPU) techological sophistication ... IOW, TSMC has better things to do than panels.
I think it's more like how would one feel about a passenger plane that a rocket scientist wouldn't touch or ride, than if it makes sense for them to build one
Importing the most advanced silicon fabs from other countries (ASML, which makes the machines that make the world's computer chips) is a different skill than building power plants. Even the nuclear power stations they have were built by General Electric and Westinghouse.
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.
TSMC, a Taiwanese company, operates the most advanced chip fabs in the world. ASML provides a key component required for it, but it’s only part of the process.
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.
Nothing annoys me like these foolish headlines. Running out of electricity? Then generate some more! With grid-scale solar and batteries (Chinese production is driving prices down aggressively) you can spin up gigawatt-scale plants almost overnight, until you can cover the shortfall with nuclear or thermal plants.
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.
> “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.
helicopter pads… are you serious? so the whole freaking country is a helicopter pad? Maybe a warm welcome for the CCP? It’s not that hard putting some solar panels on buildings. Helicopter pads as a general excuse is the dumbest i have ever heard.
>so the whole freaking country is a helicopter pad?
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.
The population density of Taiwan is 649 people per square kilometre. In the US it is 38.
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.
Unless Taiwan is crammed so full that people can't move, they can easily source 200 KM² to increase their electricity capacity by 10% (i.e., roughly 20TWh). if they realise it's a national security/economic competitiveness issue, they will solve it.
Otherwise, what do you suggest they do? Nothing? Or keep hand-wringing with articles like this?
What's that even supposed to mean? Renewable generation would be much more secure than comparable centralised generation because you'd need so many more resources to knock it out.
If i were an adversary I'd much rather my enemy source everything from a single NPP than hundreds of square km of solar.
There's not a whole lot of space in Taiwan for huge solar farms. They were close to having nuclear, but there's strong political pushback. Offshore wind seems to be doing well, at least.
Solar doesn’t need that much space. Nuclear is about 10x as energy dense in the US, so it’s better but not as much as generally portrayed.
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.
Not in the same instant but they were unavailable in overlapping succession such that the entire fleet was never close to completely online even when the grid was at maximum demand.
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.
France covered that by importing power from the rest of Europe. Taiwan doesn’t have that option as an island whose closest friendly neighbor is hundreds of kilometers away.
You mentioned offshore wind, is offshore solar not a thing? Seems it'd be rather easy to float a farm of them...easier than floating a giant windmill, at least.
Geo location aside, putting things off shore is really a way to drive up cost such as maintenance like mad and it makes even less sense when you are working with large surfaces rather than something designed around having height and wind tolerance.
Solar farms don't take a huge amount of space. The roof tops of the chip factories are probably a perfectly fine place to augment the chip factory electric use
100KM² of panels (10GW) will generate 22,000 GWh, or roughly 10% of Taiwan's current electricity demand. That is, a 10KM * 10KM field (not necessarily all in on place) that takes up just 0.3% of the island is all you need.
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.
Something must be wrong in your estimates, the biggest solar farm is ~60sqkm and only 2.2gw, it's in India and definitely get much more sun than taiwan
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
The area needed depends somewhat on where the panels are located, the north/east don't see a ton of sun for about half the year. Also, 70+% of TW is covered by mountains and dense forest. I don't mean to say it's impossible (I'd like to see a lot more solar), just that the economics aren't as good as other places.
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.
China seems happy to export solar panels to anyone.. Taiwan would probably not like to be a big importer of something it can't procure from other trade partners at similar prices though. I think Taiwan wants tariff wars with China to reduce economic ties.
Taiwan's money spends just as good as anyone's money. That's why Europe is still burning Russian gas while in a proxy war that's seen hundreds of thousands killed. It's only in Hollywood movies that you refuse perfectly good money for geopolitics.
Am I wrong to say that north stream 1 & 2 were put out of commission and Europe procures it’s gaz now via LNG that flows via the huge terminals that were built after 2022?
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.
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.
Gaz would be perfect if there wasn't a risk of Chinese blockade. Renewable would be great if there was land and no typhoon. Nuclear would be great if quakes were not a thing. The problem isn't to price electricity. It is to find a viable long term strategy for an open society having to mitigate multiple risks.
All these issues you just raised are not unique to Taiwan - everyone in the region has them yet they're expanding energy production. I mean China, specifically. If you want a zero-risk energy source, you can live in the dark, stumbling around with candles. And it's more environmentally friendly :)
You might want to check a map if you don't see the difference between China and Taiwan. It's an island, it's small as fuck and half of it is a mountain range
> With grid-scale solar and batteries (Chinese production is driving prices down aggressively) you can spin up gigawatt-scale plants almost overnight, until you can cover the shortfall with nuclear or thermal plants.
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.
Comments that consist of just "lol, no" are bad comments. You've been doing that a lot in various discussions. HN has higher standards. Please try to make your comments substantive.
Taiwan has 4 nuclear plants that IIRC they've chosen to not run *purely for political reasons*. The (imo crazy and crooked-as-hell) "green party" is currently in power).
Once another party takes over, the nukes will likely be fired up. Taiwan can make all the power it needs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Taiwan
Blue and Green in Taiwan do not relate to environmentalism, they relate to the position of the party with respect to the mainland.
Setting aside the "blue green" matter, the question remains: what exactly are the "political reasons" at play here. That phrase raises my suspicions. Which party, what is their alignment and what is their problem with nuclear power?
Green is the independent Taiwan/nationalist party. Blue is the anti-war/friendliness with China party.
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.
“Anti war/friendliness with China” is a very nice way of saying it’s the “let China seize control of the country” party.
It's nowhere near that straightforward. The party in question is the Kuomintang (KMT), who fought against the CCP in the civil war and founded the Taiwanese state. However, their position matches the PRC's in that there is "one China", and they assert that the Green/independence movement will break the status quo and basically force the PRC to invade.
The PRC is not forced to invade. That’s obvious bullshit
The PRC has repeatedly stated that a declaration of independence by Taiwan would amount to an act of war and they would be "forced" to invade to stop it. Obviously the forcing is in quotes, because it's just the PRC forcing itself, but the PRC has painted itself into a corner here and nobody has dared to call their bluff yet.
The PRC is very well known for "repeatedly stating things" [1]. Finally, after decades, the West has started to catch on to this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_final_warning
Sure, they may be bluffing, but we don't know since Taiwan has not actually declared independence.
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.
[flagged]
If the bigger country always won, the world would be one giant stable empire ruling over everyone for the last ten thousand years.
Ukraine is fighting Russia without other nation's armies directly joining them. Taiwan's allies have most of the globe's naval power.
It isn't a question of whether China would win, it is the certainty that Taiwan would lose. And regardless, that isn't the reason why large empires are unstable. Through history big countries tend to win but large agglomerations tend to dissolve for economic concerns. That is what happened in the largest imperial dissolutions in history (British, Mongols) which weren't because of a defeat by an external power or because they had any trouble conquering small powers. Or the most recent with things like the USSR.
Large empires tend to lose through military victories and bad economic strategy.
> How do you see the future playing out where China doesn't get to do what it likes to Taiwan?
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)
I take it you're not a fan of the expression "Live free or die". But not everyone agrees with you. Some understand why "liberty or death" is actually a reasonable way to live and die - that liberty is in fact worth fighting and dying for. Because if you're not willing to fight for liberty, sooner or later someone will make you either fight or become a slave, and if you won't fight, slavery is all that's left.
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.
> Some understand why "liberty or death" is actually a reasonable way to live and die
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.
With regards to “live free or die”, I’d say it only makes sense if the enemy want to genocide you. Like in the case of the Nazis, I would say fighting them is best (if you’re not “aryan”), since they’d murder you anyways.
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.
It really makes sense for the DPP (Green) to be anti-nuclear. Mainland China is using Westinghouse AP1000 designs from the US for their nuke plants. Taiwan is friendlier with the US and can get a nice discount to license the same AP1000..
The DPP isn't anti-nuclear for strategic reasons - it's anti-nuclear for ideological reasons.
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]
[0] - https://www.cw.com.tw/article/5123009
One of those "purely political reasons" being the obvious and real risks involved with having nuclear power plants in an area known for large earthquakes which was made especially real in people's minds after Fukushima ( further down in the same page you linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Taiwan#Post-F... )
Are there any risks that are real and not just in people's minds?
A significant portion of Taiwan grew up during authoritarian rule, and the anti-nuclear movement was heavily tied to the democracy movement of the 1980s-90s - especially because CKS tied his own ambitions to nuclear capacity - both for energy and potentially weapons.
It's very difficult to separate the two given that the 80s-90s generation is in power in Taiwan.
That's a long way of saying that it's just inside people's heads.
And that's a long way to say that you don't care about people's experiences.
Was Fukushima real or just in people's minds?
What was real was that a bad design that the company operating the plant was warned about repeatedly, survived an earthquake, but didn't survive a tsunami. As a result, there was an evacuation. And nobody died from anything directly related to the power plant itself, only due to the evacuation. Multiple times more people died in an oil tank fire in another city due to the same earthquake+tsunami. And during its lifetime Fukushima saved countless lives by not emitting air pollution.
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.
Fukushima was perfectly fine after the earthquake. The tsunami is what provoked the accident by knocking out the backup generators.
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.
Fukushima is simply a good example of how dangerous and expensive nuclear can be when unknown unknowns rear their head.
There are countless black swan events that are exacerbated by having nuclear around.
Could firing those up be mistaken for hostile intentions? The desire to enrich uranium (or harvest plutonium) for a nuclear program?
It's the same in Europe. Oil lobbyists infiltrated the gullible greens and convinced them that gas and oil are better than nuclear.
> Oil lobbyists infiltrated the gullible greens and convinced them that gas and oil are better than nuclear
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.
When you say “tn” do you mean the European trillion or the American one? I.e 10^15 or 10^12
Actually exactly the opposite.
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...
Unbelievable that you're saying this when the last 14 years have seen the same party in power, who throughout that entire period have ran on a platform with little in common with "the greens". It's like as if the Reps had been in power for 14 years straight in the US, and you'd still find a way to blame the Dems for a nation-level issue.
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.
I really wish australia would get into silicon foundry and semiconductor manufacturing businesses. We have the space, we have the geo stability ( lots of our space is really old and very stable from a geological standpoint...it finished moving yonks ago), we produce most of the precursor compinents in their raw forms in absolute masses or have the capacity and resources to do so and we also have the political stability.
But alas, our politicians are short sited, our companies lack the willingness to make it happen. It feels like a massively missed opportunity.
But then Australia is a country where getting Solar Power with such a vast space is difficult due to all sort of political reasons doesn't seems very friendly to all the manufacturing requirement for modern Foundry.
https://www.canstarblue.com.au/solar/solar-farms-australia/
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.
Any chance you've seen this, or have a personal take to add? https://youtu.be/QByN_XJIn8s
Foundries are supremely water-hungry too. I recall the Abu Dhabi - Global Foundries experiment didn't work out.
We got more coastline available that you can poke a stick at, much like the greenhouses next to the nullabor in south aus you just solar desalination your water and we have a near infinite supply of water available.
https://www.sundropfarms.com/our-technology/
Taiwan is sitting on the Pacific Ring of Fire. Surely there are resources of geothermal energy that could be tapped?
I love how everyone on this thread is giving energy advice to the country that "makes the world's computer chips". Surely they have a couple of smart people on that island…
In democracies (or any other government type other than the theoretical technocracy) smart people don't necessarily get to make decisions. Political considerations and dumb voters have to be taken into account.
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.
That’s exactly my point.
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.
Doesn't mean they're making the decisions.
I reckon that solar chips are approaching potato chips in terms of (relative to CPU) techological sophistication ... IOW, TSMC has better things to do than panels.
I think it's more like how would one feel about a passenger plane that a rocket scientist wouldn't touch or ride, than if it makes sense for them to build one
Countries don't always act very rationally.
I agree, this seems an extremely emotional issue.
There’s a lot to care about wrt Taiwan, I will say.
Importing the most advanced silicon fabs from other countries (ASML, which makes the machines that make the world's computer chips) is a different skill than building power plants. Even the nuclear power stations they have were built by General Electric and Westinghouse.
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.
TSMC, a Taiwanese company, operates the most advanced chip fabs in the world. ASML provides a key component required for it, but it’s only part of the process.
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.
Yeah but can they create a web based and ad infested CRUD app with javascript?!
The ego on display in the programming world is just astonishing.
Nothing annoys me like these foolish headlines. Running out of electricity? Then generate some more! With grid-scale solar and batteries (Chinese production is driving prices down aggressively) you can spin up gigawatt-scale plants almost overnight, until you can cover the shortfall with nuclear or thermal plants.
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.
"With grid-scale solar and batteries..."
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.
helicopter pads… are you serious? so the whole freaking country is a helicopter pad? Maybe a warm welcome for the CCP? It’s not that hard putting some solar panels on buildings. Helicopter pads as a general excuse is the dumbest i have ever heard.
>so the whole freaking country is a helicopter pad?
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...
The population density of Taiwan is 649 people per square kilometre. In the US it is 38.
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.
Population density is unevenly concentrated.
Yes. That means cities that aren't going to go solar are skewing the statistics, and the real density disparity is more than 17 times.
> Population density is unevenly concentrated
So are PLAN landing sites. (They’re all in the south.)
Unless Taiwan is crammed so full that people can't move, they can easily source 200 KM² to increase their electricity capacity by 10% (i.e., roughly 20TWh). if they realise it's a national security/economic competitiveness issue, they will solve it.
Otherwise, what do you suggest they do? Nothing? Or keep hand-wringing with articles like this?
> they can easily source 200 KM² to increase their electricity capacity by 10%
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.
What's that even supposed to mean? Renewable generation would be much more secure than comparable centralised generation because you'd need so many more resources to knock it out.
If i were an adversary I'd much rather my enemy source everything from a single NPP than hundreds of square km of solar.
There's not a whole lot of space in Taiwan for huge solar farms. They were close to having nuclear, but there's strong political pushback. Offshore wind seems to be doing well, at least.
Solar doesn’t need that much space. Nuclear is about 10x as energy dense in the US, so it’s better but not as much as generally portrayed.
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.
I find people generally underestimate the generation capacity of solar, both per cost and per area.
A rooftop of solar will produce enough energy for multiple households easily. The main constraints is storage.
A chip fabricator cannot run off intermittent power. It can't shutdown quickly, nor safely.
Ever heard of „battery storage“?
You can get 99.99+% uptime from a system only fed solar power. It’s the same cost vs reliability tradeoff made everywhere else.
France recently went weeks with every single nuclear power plant in the country offline, but the system was designed to cope with such downtime.
There are 56 reactors in France, they never went offline at the same time. It happened that half went offline but no more than that
Not in the same instant but they were unavailable in overlapping succession such that the entire fleet was never close to completely online even when the grid was at maximum demand.
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.
France covered that by importing power from the rest of Europe. Taiwan doesn’t have that option as an island whose closest friendly neighbor is hundreds of kilometers away.
Which suggests ramping up nuclear would be problematic in the long term for them.
At the beginning you can get great uptime but eventually you face years like this: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure2...
You mentioned offshore wind, is offshore solar not a thing? Seems it'd be rather easy to float a farm of them...easier than floating a giant windmill, at least.
> Seems it'd be rather easy to float a farm of them
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...
Geo location aside, putting things off shore is really a way to drive up cost such as maintenance like mad and it makes even less sense when you are working with large surfaces rather than something designed around having height and wind tolerance.
shouldn't there be more clouds over ocean, as that is where the clouds tend to form?
China would find an excuse to attack anything put in "their" sea.
I love that Taiwan has 20 peaks over 3km. Such a small island for that kind of geography!
Solar farms don't take a huge amount of space. The roof tops of the chip factories are probably a perfectly fine place to augment the chip factory electric use
Hello "augment" I see you've been doing some heavy lifting lately, looking good.
100KM² of panels (10GW) will generate 22,000 GWh, or roughly 10% of Taiwan's current electricity demand. That is, a 10KM * 10KM field (not necessarily all in on place) that takes up just 0.3% of the island is all you need.
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.
Something must be wrong in your estimates, the biggest solar farm is ~60sqkm and only 2.2gw, it's in India and definitely get much more sun than taiwan
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
The area needed depends somewhat on where the panels are located, the north/east don't see a ton of sun for about half the year. Also, 70+% of TW is covered by mountains and dense forest. I don't mean to say it's impossible (I'd like to see a lot more solar), just that the economics aren't as good as other places.
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.
Would they be able to procure that many panels from China when they know they'll end up in Taiwan though?
China seems happy to export solar panels to anyone.. Taiwan would probably not like to be a big importer of something it can't procure from other trade partners at similar prices though. I think Taiwan wants tariff wars with China to reduce economic ties.
China and Tawain do trade despite the situation
Taiwan's money spends just as good as anyone's money. That's why Europe is still burning Russian gas while in a proxy war that's seen hundreds of thousands killed. It's only in Hollywood movies that you refuse perfectly good money for geopolitics.
> It's only in Hollywood movies that you refuse perfectly good money for geopolitics.
So why did Russia stop delivering gas via Nord Stream 1 from 09/2022 on (before the sabotage)?
Because they weren't getting paid in "perfectly good money" (they were getting paid into frozen EU bank accounts).
Am I wrong to say that north stream 1 & 2 were put out of commission and Europe procures it’s gaz now via LNG that flows via the huge terminals that were built after 2022?
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.
After two comments saying I was wrong, I decided to google “does Europe import LNG from Russia”
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.
There are other routes.
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...
No, but we still buy Russian LNG
Gaz would be perfect if there wasn't a risk of Chinese blockade. Renewable would be great if there was land and no typhoon. Nuclear would be great if quakes were not a thing. The problem isn't to price electricity. It is to find a viable long term strategy for an open society having to mitigate multiple risks.
All these issues you just raised are not unique to Taiwan - everyone in the region has them yet they're expanding energy production. I mean China, specifically. If you want a zero-risk energy source, you can live in the dark, stumbling around with candles. And it's more environmentally friendly :)
You might want to check a map if you don't see the difference between China and Taiwan. It's an island, it's small as fuck and half of it is a mountain range
> With grid-scale solar and batteries (Chinese production is driving prices down aggressively) you can spin up gigawatt-scale plants almost overnight, until you can cover the shortfall with nuclear or thermal plants.
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.
„China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week„
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
The report is here: https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/...
Well technically, every time the sun comes up those panels start producing all over the world. FYI, it happens because the earth is spinning.
Wired with the click bait.
We've replaced the title with a less baity substring from the subtitle.
lol it’s not running out of electricity.
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.
Comments that consist of just "lol, no" are bad comments. You've been doing that a lot in various discussions. HN has higher standards. Please try to make your comments substantive.
Thank You. Glad I am not the only one noticing this.
On another note, now that Anandtech is closed are you still writing for any other website?
I already explained why the previous reply was wrong and someone replied adding no value which only needed a “lol no”.
Which of the facts of the article are incorrect? Does the conclusion not follow from the facts? What's wrong with the article?
The article doesn’t actually make the claim that they are running out of electricity.