THE RESIDENTS OF Kungliao, the little coastal town 40km from Taipei where the on-again off-again nuclear plant project remains in suspense, can take heart. The cat is out of the bag: Nuclear energy is not cheap, it's not safe, and it's no solution to Taiwan's long-term energy needs.

This much is now acknowledged across the political spectrum. Meanwhile, the longer the issue is allowed to paralyze the machinery of the state, the more the public takes note of what the debate is about. And with nuclear energy there's one infallible rule: the more people know about it, the less they want anything to do with it.

Just a generation ago, populations all over the world were prepared to give governments the benefit of the doubt regarding nuclear energy. They accepted, more or less, what the scientists and industrialists and bureaucrats and politicians told them about the wondrous, clean, low-cost energy resource that would lead them into a bright, unpolluted future with almost inexhaustible supplies of power. Opponents were dismissed as cranks, hippies and subversives.

Revelations

But in due course, all that changed. In the US, it changed with Three Mile Island; in Europe with Chernobyl. It has changed recently in Japan with revelations of nuclear blunders that have been covered up over the decades, and it's changing now in Taiwan. It changed as the numbers of those who fell victim to radiation spills and experiments began to mount up. It changed once it became apparent to government, to big business, and to the banks and insurers who underwrite the power industry, that the supposed economic benefits were non-existent once the true costs of building, running and decommissioning nuclear plants were factored in -- not to mention the impossibility of making the lethally contaminated leftovers disappear.

Coming into the light

So long as you keep people in the dark about what's at stake, it's relatively easy to persuade them that nuclear energy is the only guarantee of a future power supply, and by extension of national stability and prosperity. But once the topic becomes the focus of national debate, illuminated by the massed spotlights of media interest and public concern, there's only one way for the tide to turn -- against nuclear energy.

There never has been an example of more discussion and awareness translating into more public support for nuclear energy, and there's no reason why Taiwan should be the first exception.

`Not our fault'

Taipower (¥x¹q) and the ruling establishment have long been comfortable with consumers' lack of interest in the topic of energy production. For years the state utility has brooded over its monopoly, resisting modernization, obstructing the development of sustainable energy policies and responding to complaints about unreliable electricity supply by throwing up its hands and wailing: "It's not our fault -- we need more nuclear power plants!"

State of neglect

Meanwhile, national energy policy has been allowed to fall into a shocking state of neglect. As shown by the extraordinary island wide blackout of July 1999 (triggered by the failure of a single pylon) and the frequent outages that still shut down production at Hsinchu Science-based Park (·s¦Ë¤u·~¶é°Ï), the Energizer Bunny of Taiwan's high-tech industrial miracle is powered by a piece of rusty old clockwork.

The whole sector needs a radical shake-up: new blood and new ideas, plus integrated policies for reduced consumption, increased efficiency, and diversified power production. What it doesn't need is another facility drawing on the most dangerous, discredited energy source known to man.

Turning point

In the future, when people look back on this critical moment -- the turning point for nuclear energy in Taiwan -- it is possible that they will remember above all the historic session of the Legislative Yuan on Jan. 31, when 135 of Taiwan's finest voted to resuscitate the island's moribund nuclear energy program.

That gloriously blinkered decision was the last, sad hurrah of Taiwan's nuclear-industrial complex, and will probably turn out to have been the opposition parties' last bungled chance of rescuing their reputations in time for upcoming elections.

By concentrating on the nuclear power issue at the expense of everything else, exploiting it to foment what they would like to believe is a popular backlash against a weak government, the opposition alliance has well and truly shot itself in the foot -- full-bore, double-barrel.

Perhaps they can't quite bring themselves to look at the bloodied stump dangling below their knee. But eventually they'll have to. And when the pain kicks in, when they realize how venal they appear in the eyes of much of the electorate, there are going to be some extraordinary contortions -- as parties and lawmakers scramble to disassociate themselves from both the pro-nuclear vote and the impending electoral debacle.

A monument to `entrenched interests'

The residents of Kungliao should know that history is on their side; it's the opposition legislators who will be the big losers. I would like to suggest, therefore, that the residents commemorate this triumph by erecting a splendid monument, in black and gold, to those valiant defenders of entrenched interests, the 135 relics of the ancient regime who were so obsessed with face and immediate political gain that they completely and utterly missed the tide of the times.

Every one of them deserves to have their name carved in stone at the site of the plant, so that they may be linked in perpetuity with the monolithic remains of nuclear energy in Taiwan.

We already know that a nuclear power plant will never again be commissioned for these shores, and we can be 90 percent certain that the Kungliao plant, even if completed, will never be used. The coming elections will see to that. Instead, the plant will stand as one of the last great follies of the KMT era, a multibillion dollar monument to the "face" of Lien Chan(³s¾Ô) and the "edifice complex" of his party.

Let's hope that as a result of this costly blunder, all political groupings in Taiwan will learn to put the public interest first -- even when it contradicts their own grandiose image of themselves.

Christopher MacDonald is a freelance writer based in Taipei.

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