Taiwan’s anti-nuclear party moves to restart the reactors it shut

Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) took power a decade ago promising to close every reactor on the island. Its own government is now preparing to switch one back on.

Taiwan’s Nuclear Safety Commission said in late September that it had finished reviewing state utility Taipower’s plan to restart the Maanshan nuclear power plant at Hengchun, on the island’s southern tip. The plant, whose second and last reactor went offline on May 17, 2025, could be generating again as early as 2028, ABC News and local media reports.

If this goal is to be realised, however, Taipower still has to carry out ageing assessments, radiation reviews and seismic safety checks, then submit an implementation report, before the nation's regulator can renew the plant’s operating licence.

For the DPP, the restart reverses an energy policy that has been part of the party’s identity since its founding in 1986. Former president Tsai Ing-wen made a “nuclear-free homeland” by 2025 law after winning office in 2016, and her government kept to the timetable through two terms. She officially left office in May 2024. Six months later Cho Jung-tai, premier under her successor Lai Ching-te, said Taiwan could reconsider its nuclear-free homeland policy if new nuclear technologies proved safe.

In the eyes of many in Taiwan it was seen as the new administration doing an about-face as regards the earlier policies of Lai's predecessor.

As of 2026, Taiwan imports an estimated 96% of its total energy supply, according to the Energy Administration. This is made up largely of LNG which supplied about 47% of its power last year, coal 35% and renewables 13%, Ministry of Economic Affairs figures show, well short of Tsai’s 20% renewables target for 2025.

Gas was meant to carry the grid while wind and solar caught up, but Taiwan holds only about two weeks of LNG at any time. Following the opening salvos in the ongoing Iran war, President Lai said in March that stocks covered 12 to 14 days, and a war game run by a US think tank found that a blockade of the Taiwan Strait would drain gas reserves in 10 days.

LNG prices soared after Russia invaded Ukraine and spiked again this year when the conflict between the US and Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, one of the chokepoints that Asian gas buyers depend on, Tsung-Kuang Yeh, dean of the College of Nuclear Science at National Tsing Hua University, told the broadcaster. He said the swing in public mood towards nuclear power grew out of energy-security worries sharpened by blackouts across the country.

The economy ministry now expects electricity consumption to grow by 2.5% a year through 2035, up from a previous forecast of 1.7%, with AI data centres alone projected to need 3.1GW-4.1GW. Chipmakers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TWSE: 2330), the island’s biggest power user, have pressed for supply that is both stable and low-carbon and in just the last week the Japan Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Taipei urged the government to work towards the same end.

Lai cited “the power demands of the artificial intelligence era” when he announced on March 21 that Taipower would seek approval to restart Maanshan and the Kuosheng plant in New Taipei, the Taipei Times reported. He also insisted that the island did not need the reactors yet.

“Even without nuclear power, Taiwan can maintain a stable electricity supply until 2032, with daily reserve margins consistently above 10%,” Lai said, naming nuclear safety, waste disposal and public consensus as the conditions for any restart in a partial nod to old-timers in the DPP intent on clinging to Tsai's nuclear-free homeland concept.

Chen Shui-bian, the DPP’s first president, halted construction of the Lungmen plant, Taiwan’s fourth, soon after taking office in 2000, then resumed work in 2001. Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011 turned opposition into a mass movement. Protests at the time helped push the Kuomintang (KMT) government of Ma Ying-jeou to mothball Lungmen in 2014, and Tsai’s government wrote the 2025 deadline into the Electricity Act in 2017.

A 2018 referendum subsequently struck the 2025 deadline from the law, yet the reactors still closed one by one as their 40-year licences ran out: Chinshan in 2018-2019, Kuosheng in 2021-2023 and Maanshan in 2024-2025. In 2021 Taiwanese voters rejected a proposal to resume building Lungmen.

Lai himself floated keeping shuttered plants available for emergencies in May 2023, while vice president and the party’s presidential candidate. It was an idea which raised eyebrows until his campaign said he had been answering a hypothetical question about a war or a blockade, and the DPP said its promise of a nuclear-free homeland was unchanged, the Taipei Times reported at the time.

The legal path back then opened in May 2025, when the KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), which together hold a majority in the Legislative Yuan, amended the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act to let operators seek 20-year licence extensions beyond the 40-year limit as is seen in a number of other countries operating nuclear power plants - the US, UK, France and Japan included. The government cited the amendment as the legal basis for the restart process. In November 2025 the economy ministry had already endorsed a Taipower review that judged Maanshan and Kuosheng fit for reoperation, while ruling out the older Chinshan plant.

Lai’s own caucus has kept its distance though, likely wary of annoying long-time party backers. In March DPP caucus chief executive Chuang Jui-hsiung called the president’s remarks “a contingency response” and said it was a misinterpretation to say the DPP government had a definite intention to restart nuclear plants. In September the KMT’s Chen I-hsin demanded an apology from Lai, calling the DPP’s opposition to nuclear power a “mistaken policy”, the Taipei Times reported.

Voters moved first: in an August 2025 referendum about 4.3mn people voted to reopen Maanshan and 1.5mn against, but turnout was too low for the result to stand. On November 28 this year, alongside local elections, Taiwan will vote on whether the government should abolish the Nuclear-Free Homeland policy, a question put forward by the KMT and the TPP that the Central Election Commission approved on August 28 according to Focus Taiwan. It passes only if yes votes outnumber no votes and exceed a quarter of all eligible voters - not the easiest of asks given that voting in Taiwan tends to be carried out on weekends and the system in place at present demands that voters return to home towns to cast their ballot.

Even prior to the vote, critics argue that Maanshan is too small to matter. The plant supplied 4%-5% of Taiwan’s electricity before it closed, said Pei-Wei Yang, a researcher at the Taiwan Climate Action Network, citing Energy Administration figures. “Even if we do restart them, they’re not going to contribute that much towards the growth,” he said.

Compounding the criticism of a return to nuclear power generation is the fact that Taiwan has never settled where its nuclear waste should go. Taipei used to ship low-level waste to Orchid Island off the southeast coast of the main island, until protests over the lack of Indigenous consent stopped the practice in 1996. Thirty years later though, the waste remains there but Taipower said last year that indoor dry storage at Maanshan could be ready as early as 2031, and it has hired US-based Holtec International to build dry storage at Chinshan and Kuosheng.

As the nation stands today, a decade after promising to shut every reactor on the island, while Taiwan’s DPP government is edging towards restarting the Maanshan plant, the ruling party remains openly divided. President Lai cites AI-era demand while insisting nuclear isn’t needed before 2032, and his own caucus plays down any firm intent to restart. That hesitancy sits awkwardly with an island that imports 96% of its energy, holds barely two weeks of LNG and faces fast-rising power demand from the chipmakers driving its exports.

With the November 28 referendum on scrapping the nuclear-free homeland policy facing a steep turnout threshold, and the waste question still unresolved, Taipei risks letting indecision rather than policy set the terms of its energy security and of the export machine that depends on it.