Our nuked environment

Chinese chess pieces.

Wow. Making the rounds since last night is the news, not exactly unknown, that the KMT government is totally despicable. The Min. of Economic Affairs purchased internet keywords, including the names of anti-nuclear activists, to promote its pro-nuclear propaganda:

The anti-nuclear activists from various civic groups discovered that when they searched for their own names on Google, Yahoo and other search engines, a pro-nuclear power Web site (anuclear-safety.twenergy.org.tw) operated by the ministry will appear as the first suggested Web site.

As the Web site’s content is clearly in contrast with the activists’ beliefs about nuclear power, the anti-nuclear advocates, including Nuclear-Free Homeland Alliance executive director Lee Cho-han (李卓翰), Tokyo-based Taiwanese anti-nuclear writer Liu Li-erh (劉黎兒) and Green Consumers Foundation chairman Jay Fang (方儉), among others, expressed anger and disgust about the advertising link.

The linkage was first discovered by Lee last week when he was searching for his own name on Google. He immediately contacted Google and Yahoo on the same day, asking them to take down the advertisement.

The Bureau of Energy said on Tuesday that it had bought the keyword advertisement on popular search engines, linking to a total of 92 keywords — including 29 names of people who often spoke publicly about nuclear power.

With a government like this, how can anyone trust the safety and financial assurances of these selfsame pro-nuke bureaucrats? Speaking of safety, Reuters reported that the first nuke plant was leaking water:

A nuclear power plant in Taiwan may have been leaking radioactive water for three years, according to a report published by the government's watchdog, adding to uncertainty over the fate of a new fourth nuclear power plant.

The First Nuclear Power Plant, located at Shihmen in a remote northern coastal location but not far from densely populated Taipei, has been leaking toxic water from storage pools of two reactors, said the watchdog, called the Control Yuan.

An official of Taiwan Power Co. (Taipower), which operates the island's nuclear power plants, said the water did not come from the storage pools, but may have come from condensation or water used for cleaning up the floor.

Don't you feel re-assured now? The bad news out of Fukushima continues -- last month plumes of steam were observed emanating from one of the damaged units, meaning that it is possible something is fissioning in there. We have many of the same conditions here that Fukushima does, from a government and political party maniacally committed to nuclear power to the same set of quake and tsunami zones. There could hardly be anything dumber than building nuclear power plants in a place beset by quakes, tsunamis, and possible bombing and missile attacks, but the government of Taiwan put in four. With no place to store the waste.

Speaking of the environment, the government is relaxing development restrictions around reservoirs. The Liberty Times says:

行政院院會昨通過水土保持法部分條文修正草案，未來水庫集水區內除須特別保護者劃定為「特定水土保持區」外，其餘水庫集水區可進行開發；已劃定為山坡地範圍的土地，經報行政院核定公告即可變更。但環保團體痛批此法為「亡國之法」，台灣會完蛋。

The Executive Yuan yesterday passed the draft amendment of certain provisions of the Soil and Water Conservation Act. Except for future reservoir catchment areas requiring special protection designated as a "Soil and Water Conservation Area", the reservoir catchment area can be developed and will be designated as slopeland areas. The Executive Yuan for approval and notice of the changes. But environmental groups criticized this move as the "subjugation of the law," saying that Taiwan will be finished.

This blogpost, forwarded to me by a local environmentalist, gives more details. Originally as many of my readers know, development was forbidden across the catchment area in its entirety. However, the Water Bureau felt that this was having a negative impact on the economy (hahahaha) by which it meant a negative impact on pockets filled by land development under the benevolent gaze of the construction-industrial state. Gravel and soil digging will also be permitted, according to this piece.

Thus, now the term "Soil and Water Conservation Area" will cover only those areas such as streams and slopes with severe landslide threat. As if developers won't ignore that the way they always do. The result, according to the blogger, is that just 17% of catchment areas will be protected, leaving 83% -- 1.72 million hectares -- for developers to ensorcel that land using that special alchemical brew by which public land is turned into private gold.

The blogger goes on to note that only Baihe and Wushantou reservoirs will have entirely protected catchment areas. The destruction is going to be immense.

UPDATE: Don't miss Fagan's comments below.
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Daily Links:

• DON'T MISS: Excellent IPS piece by longtime Taiwan reporter and commentator Dennis Engbarth on the Services Pact and J Michael's piece on how reporters covering the protests against the forced evictions are being manhandled and blocked by the police.
• China prepares for psy-ops in war with Taiwan
• Only in China: A private zoo in Henan puts Tibetan mastiff in cage, labels it a lion
• 30,000 Pinoys line up for jobs in Taiwan as ban on hiring is lifted.
• Chinese herbal medicines can cause cancer. D'oh.
• How China is poaching skilled physicians from Taiwan: Commonwealth
• From Donovan Smith of ICRT, another 'Only in Taichung' story:
  

  "Last Friday marked the opening of the “City Govt Tourist Night Market” featuring in the ballpark of 400 booths, amusement rides and more covering over 11,000 square metres. Billed as ‘Taiwan’s most expensive night market’ and located by the posh and fashionable Qiqi district, the market was an instant hit as crowds poured in to check out the newest city attraction.
  
  Aside from the unexpectedly large crowds creating more traffic and garbage than was expected, the market had one significant problem--it wasn’t legal, and the ‘city govt’ portion of the name related to the street name and area of its location, not any connection to the city govt itself. The city had rejected their application on the ground that the proposed market was to be nearly 7 times larger than what is allowed in a residential district. Undeterred, organizers forged ahead.
  
  City inspectors were ready on Friday, and immediately issued NT$60,000 in fines and ordered the market be shut down.
  
  This did nothing to deter the organizers, however, and an increasing frustrated city govt kept increasing the fines--reaching a whopping NT$9.6 million total by the end of the weekend. Their defiance ended when the city pulled the plug on power and water, and moved in with equipment to tear it all down--leaving vendors and organizers scrambling to get their gear out before the city did it for them."

• NOT TAIWAN: If you want to understand what's happening in Egypt, mideast expert Juan Cole has a great post explaining it.
  

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Rain = Silt

Two years ago next month I wrote a post that touched on the silt problems threatening the lifespans of Taiwan's dams. The torrential rains we're getting now, plus the massive downpours we can expect from the typhoon on its way in time for the weekend, suggests that our reservoirs will take another blow..... the article that inspired that post noted...

Before Shihmen Reservoir was completed, engineers estimated that silt would flow into it at a rate of 790,000 cubic meters per year, giving it a useful life of at least 71 years. The reservoir began filling with water in May 1963, but when Typhoon Gloria struck northwestern Taiwan in September of the same year, it washed more than 19 million cubic meters of silt into the new reservoir, equivalent to one-third of its silt capacity. This knocked 23 years off its life expectancy at a stroke.

Morakot did the same thing.....

In August 2009, Typhoon Morakot struck Taiwan with record-breaking rainstorms and devastating floods. As a result, the Cengwun and Nanhua Dam were ravaged, the massive flood water caused Cengwun Dam to silt up with 90 million cubic meters of mud, while Nanhua also suffered silting up of 17 million cubic meters of mud. Consequently, the water retaining capacities of the dams were significantly reduced, seriously affecting the water supply in the Greater Tainan region.

A DPP legislator commented in the Taipei Times in 2010:

Following Typhoon Morakot last August, the bed of the Laonong River (荖濃溪) in southern Taiwan rose in some places by more than 23m, and the cross-watershed transfer project built to supply water to the Zengwen Reservoir (曾文水庫) in Taipei County was almost completely ruined. That was followed on March 4 by the Jiasian earthquake, after which environmentalist groups found that the transfer conduit tunnel was crossed by four geological faults, presenting the danger of collapse in case of a powerful earthquake.

The conduit is discussed in detail in this 2009 post on The View on the destruction of Hsiaolin Village. The DPP legislator's piece stated that Tsengwen Reservoir's current capacity is less than 40%; it is so shallow that in the rainy season it often overflows and has to be lowered. UPDATE: Mike Fagan, who has traveled all over the south looking at its dams, reminds me that the 2010 program to combat the silting problem of the Tsengwen and Nanhua Reservoirs was implemented and $16 billion was spent on it. A 2011 piece from the China Post notes an important connection between the reservoirs and the construction-industrial state:

The Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) had earlier planned to remove 52 million cubic meters of sand and mud from December 2010 to November 2011 but is now shortening the plan's completion time to the end of June.

....

According to Wu, the government's dredging efforts have achieved good results, with sand prices having fallen by almost 25 percent from July to December last year, lowering the costs of public construction projects.

Heh. Fagan told me of the tributary widening: "you can see the difference - the newer weirs are much wider than the older stuff, and use different designs." Here are his posts on his trips to Nanhua and Tsengwen.

A UDN editorial sketched the future of Taiwan's dams:

To exacerbate things even further, extreme weather patterns have become ever more prevalent because of global warming. Both the Research Center for Environmental Changes at Academia Sinica and the United Nations-affiliated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have already confirmed that every time the world’s average temperature rises by one degree Celsius, the amount of moisture in the atmosphere increases by 7 percent. This means that convection has intensified and there are now more severe heavy downpours and fewer light showers.

What is more, after analyzing Taiwan’s rainfall data from the last 45 years, Academia Sinica discovered that over this period the number of “severe” and “extremely severe” downpours in Taiwan has increased by 100 percent. The island has thus been affected by extreme weather conditions to a far greater degree than the global average.

If four typhoons strike Taiwan every year, and each typhoon affects the nation for two days, then 40 percent of annual precipitation would fall in eight short days. The number of days when it rains more than 1,000 millimeters per day has also become more frequent. But most of this rainfall flows rapidly directly to the ocean, and very little remains. All this means that the situation whereby Taiwan “rains a lot, but has very little water to use” is getting worse.

On the other hand, the number of days when there has been a light drizzle or sprinkle has declined sharply. Statistics show that during the last few decades, moderate showers fell an average of 70 days per year. In the last few years, this number has gone down to fewer than 30 days per year. Light rains moisten the earth, gradually percolate underground, then slowly migrate to rivers, and finally fill dams with water. This regulating system has today been weakened and is coming to a halt, so that the number of days when rivers run dry has increased, and droughts are becoming more common. The land is undergoing desertification, the rivers are filled with mud and dams are becoming silted.

The bashing by severe rains washes more silt down, meaning that in our warming world dams will have shorter life spans and serve up less water.
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Daily Links:

• Floods and slides nail southern Taiwan
• The Ma Administration moves to alter the textbooks to make Taiwan more "Chinese." An Administration retrograde in almost every way.
• MKL says ChinaSMACK is looking for a Taiwan person
• Drew with our Northern Cross-Island Highway ride report. Great pictures.
• Far Eastern Sweet Potato on the Achilles' Heel of our fast attack boats.
• The Great Taipei Housing Bubble is slowly pushing buyers further south.
• Taiwan exempted from US sanctions on Iranian oil.

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.