Lungmen Nuclear Power Plant

Construction work in 2009

location

Coordinates

25 ° 2 '18 " N , 121 ° 55' 27" E Coordinates: 25 ° 2 '18 " N , 121 ° 55' 27" E

Country:

Taiwan

Data

Owner:

Taiwan Power Company

Operator:

Taiwan Power Company

Project start:

1978

Active reactors (gross):

2 (1272 MW)

Was standing:

April 26, 2018

The data source of the respective entries can be found in the documentation .

The Lungmen nuclear power plant in Chinese 龍門核能發電廠 , Pinyin Lóngmén Hénéng Fādiànchǎng is the fourth commercial NPP in Taiwan. It is a twin-block system of the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) type with 1300 MW each. The construction of the power plant was stopped at an advanced stage in April 2014 after years of protests.

location

The facility covers approximately 480 hectares and is located in the Gongliao district of the city of New Taipei in the northeast of the island, directly on the coast. It is about 20 kilometers from Keelung and 40 kilometers from Taipei .

history

Lungmen's history is unusually long. It was started in 1978 in response to the increasing demand for energy around the capital Taipei . In April 1985 there was a first opposition that questioned the need for another nuclear power plant. After the Chernobyl disaster , the funds for the construction were temporarily frozen.

In 1996 the project was put out to tender again. An AWBR was ordered from General Electric as general contractor, who then subcontracted to Toshiba , and it was ultimately built by Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries Co. Ltd. (IHI) . The ABWR was developed by General Electric , Hitachi and Toshiba and has only been used in Japan so far. Construction began on both blocks in 1999. Block 1 was originally scheduled to go into operation in 2006, and block 2 in 2007.

With the end of the Cold War, the ruling Kuomintang party had to leave more room for the opposition, and so there was a change of government in 2000. The cabinet of the newly elected President Chen Shui-bian decided to freeze construction (one of his election promises), but it did not last in court due to formal errors. On June 15, 2002 it became known that weld seams were made from unsuitable material in the reactor foundation. 22 officials were fined for lack of supervision.

The negative attitude towards nuclear power in large parts of Taiwanese society increased with the Fukushima nuclear disaster . After years of protests that came to a head in early 2014, President Ma Ying-jeou's Kuomintang government announced that construction would be halted again and promised to hold a referendum on the future of the power plant.

Work on the nuclear power plant was suspended for three years in June 2015, after which a referendum was held on the commissioning of the first reactor. There was a change of government in Taiwan in 2016. After the nuclear-critical Democratic Progressive Party took office, it announced Taiwan's gradual phase-out of nuclear power by 2025. The Lungmen nuclear power plant is no longer to go online. The cost was originally expected to be around 5.5 billion US dollars, and by mid-2015, 283.8 billion NT $ (8.4 billion euros) had been spent.

The operator Taipower plans to build systems for electricity generation from renewable energy sources on the property. The technology from the power plant is to be sold to a country that sticks to nuclear energy. In March 2018 it was announced that fuel rods already delivered for the nuclear power plant worth NT $ 8 billion (€ 240 million) are to be returned to the USA. In January 2019, Taipower drew a line under the power plant project, among other things, General Electric was not able to replace aging components of the reactors, as many of them had ceased production. The legislature has decided that all nuclear fuel rods are to be removed from the facility by the end of 2020.

Data of the reactor blocks

The Lungmen nuclear power plant consists of two blocks :

Reactor block	Reactor type	net power	gross power	start of building	Network synchronization	Commercialization of essential operation	switching off processing
Lungmen-1	Boiling water reactor (ABWR)	1300 MW	1350 MW	March 31, 1999	no	none (commissioning aborted)	2014 commissioning, 2016 government declaration on planned non-commissioning
Lungmen-2	Boiling water reactor (ABWR)	1300 MW	1350 MW	08/30/1999	no	none (construction canceled)	2014 demolition of construction work, 2016 government declaration on planned non-commissioning