The phase-out of nuclear power generation has left Taiwan vulnerable to global supply shocks and challenged to meet the fast-growing, AI-driven energy needs of its tech sector. The government is now considering restarting two shuttered nuclear power plants. How feasible is that option?
In March this year, President Lai Ching-te announced a plan to restart two of the country’s decommissioned nuclear reactors, pending a review by Taiwan’s Nuclear Safety Commission. It was a stunning turnaround for any politician in the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Formed in the 1980s as the political opposition to Taiwan’s former authoritarian government, the DPP has long made firm rejection of nuclear power a key part of its platform. The party finally realized its goal of achieving a “nuclear-free homeland” in May 2025 with the closure of the Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant, the last operating facility in Taiwan. But speaking to local TV news station TVBS in March, Lai said Taiwan “has already entered a new situation” requiring rethinking of national energy policy.
He cited surging power demand from the island’s vaunted technology sector, continuing calls for decarbonization of its industrial base, and glaring vulnerabilities stemming from its extreme dependency on imported energy.
Taiwan imports around 97% of its energy demand, and the recent U.S.-Iran conflict that closed key oil and gas shipping routes left it scrambling to secure scarce supplies of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and crude oil.
“Geopolitical change means Taiwan’s power buildout must not only be sufficient and low carbon, but also resilient,” Lai told TVBS. Nuclear power has the potential to fulfill all three of those criteria. The reversal prompted intense criticism from nuclear opponents.
“The president may be able to explain himself to his business friends, but how is he going to answer to his supporters?” Tsui Shu-hsin, a longtime anti-nuclear advocate and secretary-general of the Green Citizens’ Action Alliance, was quoted as saying in a March Focus Taiwan article.
Even within the DPP, Lai’s announcement was interpreted cautiously. The party’s caucus chief executive Chuang Jui-hsiung told local media, “It is a misinterpretation to say that the DPP government has a definite intention to restart nuclear plants,” describing it instead as a contingency response to changing circumstances.
Lai’s nuclear reversal reflects “a collision between the DPP’s traditional idealism on this issue and the hard, cold reality that their energy situation is a massive security vulnerability,” says Kharis Templeman, a lecturer in the East Asia Studies Department at Stanford University.
It’s also not entirely surprising, Templeman says, noting Lai “has been much more open to extending or reactivating the nuclear plants than” former President Tsai Ing-wen, who remained staunchly opposed to nuclear power during her tenure from 2016 to 2024.
Lai has “been navigating that relationship with his predecessor at the same time that he’s also navigating this longstanding opposition from mostly the older members of the DPP,” Templeman says, adding “there’s a big generational divide in the party.”
Taiwan’s three existing nuclear power plants — Jinshan and Kuosheng in the North and Maanshan in the South — each operated for 40 years under licensing agreements from the national regulatory authority, the Nuclear Safety Commission (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission). During that time, the power they generated was among the cheapest in the state-monopoly Taiwan Power Co. (Taipower) system.
Although the Commission doesn’t disclose how much usable nuclear fuel remains, Taiwan would typically maintain between 12 and 24-months’ supply, sufficient to withstand short-term energy shocks. Further, Taipower has safely operated the plants at near-full capacity for their entire lifespans, achieving multiple international awards for its track record.
Yet politically, the industry has been almost as radioactive as the spent fuel sitting in reactor cooling pools, with historically high degrees of public opposition spurred by safety concerns.
For densely populated and earthquake-prone Taiwan, those fears are not without merit. They were catalyzed by Japan’s catastrophic Fukushima disaster in 2011 that saw an entire nuclear power plant wiped out by a tsunami, leading to toxin-emitting fires and massive radiation leaks.
To address those concerns, Lai has insisted that for any restart to occur, nuclear safety must be assured, a solution must be found for disposing of nuclear waste, and a social consensus must exist.
Taiwan’s nuclear turnaround reflects a global shift in sentiment regarding the once-vilified industry. In response to surging data center demand, the Trump administration is looking to quadruple America’s nuclear capacity by 2050.
This change in attitude has become another factor in Lai’s nuclear stance. “Pressure from the U.S. has become important,” Templeman says. “Nuclear and energy supplies are now a much bigger part of the bilateral economic conversation.”
Taiwan is also seeing a dramatic rise in energy demand, not just for data centers themselves but also to produce the semiconductors that power them. Chips designed by U.S. company Nvidia that are at the heart of the AI boom are mostly produced by Taiwanese chip giant TSMC, which is looking to dramatically expand capacity at home. Taiwan is also central to Nvidia’s server and electronics supply chain through firms like Foxconn, Quanta, Wistron, Inventec, and Pegatron.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) expects electricity demand to grow around 2.5% annually between 2026 and 2035 — more than twice the rate of the previous decade and equivalent to a cumulative increase of some 28%.
This dynamic contributed to a huge shift in public sentiment around the island. Some three quarters of votes cast in a referendum last August supported restarting Maanshan, a “very important change in Taiwan,” says Tarcy Shih-Ting Jhou, senior researcher with the Japan-based Asia-Pacific Energy Research Center (APERC). Jhou was speaking at a conference hosted by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. to discuss Taiwan’s energy situation in the AI revolution.
The referendum, supported by a consortium of activist groups led by Nuclear Mythbusters, ultimately fell just short of the necessary 25% voter participation. But that result already represented a shift from just four years earlier, when another referendum — to resume construction of a fourth nuclear plant that has stood partially built for years — was rejected by voters.
And though the August ballot failed to pass, it still managed to send a message to the government, says Yeh Tsung-kuang, dean of the College of Nuclear Science at National Tsing Hua University and a longtime proponent of nuclear power. “Because of this [latest] outcome, President Lai noticed there is great support for the restart of nuclear,” Yeh told TOPICS, adding that Lai “said he would respect the outcome of this public referendum.”
After the vote, Taipower got straight to work, signing agreements last year with Westinghouse, the manufacturer of Maanshan’s twin 951-megawatt (MW) reactors, to provide personnel and technological assistance for the restart. And as decommissioning plans have not yet been submitted for either Maanshan or Kuosheng, both plants have remained in shuttered-but-operational states since retirement. This could reduce the time needed for inspections by the Nuclear Safety Commission.
MOEA Minister Kung Ming-hsin has said that safety inspections at Maanshan would take up to two years. Assuming everything goes smoothly, the earliest the plant could be back online is 2028. Kuosheng — which needs more renovations due to complicated waste disposal issues — would restart a year or two later. At around 1.9 gigawatts (GW) each, these two plants could have generated some 13% of Taiwan’s total 2025 generation of 252 terawatt hours (TWh).
Filling the gaps
Even with the risks raised by the nuclear-free homeland policy regarding foreign energy dependency and clean power generation, Taiwan has fallen short of its renewable energy deployment while remaining highly vulnerable to global trade turmoil.
The island has doubled its LNG import capacity over the past decade, but expansion of gas-fired generation means it still has a razor-thin, two-week supply on hand at any given time, a level that has remained virtually unchanged for a decade, according to the MOEA and national petroleum firm CPC.
Gas-fired capacity now generates over half of the nation’s power, up from 36% in 2016. The Tsai administration elected that year set ambitious plans for a German-style transition away from both fossil fuels and nuclear through renewable energy. So far Taiwan has made impressive strides, building out some 14 GW of solar and over 3 GW of offshore wind capacity.
As of 2025, renewables including hydropower and biofuels comprise 37% of total generating capacity, compared to 10% in 2016. At that time, Taiwan had 5.1 GW of nuclear power capacity in its three operating nuclear plants.
Despite a near-quadrupling of capacity over the subsequent decade, however, renewables only generated a little more than 12% of total power last year, up from around 5% in 2016. This disparity is due to renewables’ lower capacity factors. Solar in Taiwan generates about 15% of its nameplate capacity — how much it can produce in ideal conditions — due in part to the island’s frequent cloud cover and haze.
Wind power performs better, around 28% for onshore and more than 40% for offshore, according to the MOEA’s Energy Administration. But this still falls well below nuclear, which Taipower often ran at or near — or sometimes even above — 100% of the nameplate level. Taiwan’s total power generating installed capacity for renewables in 2025 was nearly 60 GW, compared to around 42 GW 10 years earlier, but generated less than 12% more power. And development is beginning to stall out, as the solar sector struggles to find increasingly scarce land and offshore wind’s ambitions falter amid surging costs.
This situation raises major concerns for Taiwan’s critical chipmaking and data center industries. TSMC alone is said to consume 6-8% of Taiwan’s electricity, while the semiconductor supply chain consumes about 20%. Plans to build massive new plants will raise demand further. The huge increase in data center construction is driving demand upwards globally, but Taiwan will struggle to build capacity fast enough to take advantage of it, says Jhou of APERC.
In their race to enter the lucrative AI market, data center operators want their projects to go online within 2-3 years after groundbreaking. “But if you want to build a substation and also the transmission, [or] even just the LNG infrastructure receiving terminal, it takes around 5 to 10 years,” Jhou says. Taiwan “cannot develop certain infrastructure faster than the AI development. That will be a major challenge for Taiwan’s energy situation.”
Unsustainable costs
In contrast to the output of newly built nuclear plants, which is among the costliest power to bring to market, electricity generated by reactivating Taipower’s already depreciated nuclear power plants would be a bargain at NT$1.98 per kilowatt-hour (kWh). Wind power, on the other hand, averages NT$6.57/kWh, while solar comes in at NT$4.86/kWh, according to Taipower.
Even so, consumers pay only NT$3.48/kWh, meaning that Taipower loses money with every watt sold. The utility has suffered heavy losses over the years, with NT$351 million (US$11 million) in accumulated losses in 2025.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s consistently high proportion of coal-fired power generation complicates the government’s sustainability goals. Coal’s share of the energy generation mix remains at 26.6%, above its target limit of 20%, according to Taipower’s most recent figures.
While overall pollution levels have been dramatically reduced at the notorious 5.5-GW Taichung coal-fired power plant, it remains one of the world’s largest carbon emitters and a source of outrage in the central Taiwanese city.
Yet despite nuclear’s potential to help resolve cost and pollution issues, some thorny issues remain. A key challenge is waste management — how to handle the spent fuel from multiple nuclear plants. The central government only recently resolved decades-long disputes with New Taipei City — where both the Kuosheng and Jinshan plants are located — over its proposed spent fuel storage solution.
In addition, public opinion on nuclear power has vacillated significantly in the years since Fukushima, with Taiwan’s former widespread hostility to the sector giving way to what some see as growing support. But that could easily change, depending on developments in the industry.
The latest policy reversal is therefore only the beginning, the first of several steps that need to be taken before Taiwan sees the return of nuclear power generation.
In May of last year, Taiwan’s legislature amended the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act to extend the 40-year operating limit on nuclear plants. The motion passed mostly with support from the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP).
But some see the opposition’s pro-nuclear stance as insincere. Taichung-based political commenter and Taipei Times columnist Michael Turton notes that neither KMT legislators nor former President Ma Ying-jeou took action to extend the lives of the three plants when they controlled the government between 2008 and 2016. He says this lack of action forced the DPP to continue closing the plants, while allowing the KMT to “blame the DPP for their closure.”
Others question Lai’s willingness to buck his party’s old guard on nuclear. The president’s conditions for reopening the plants could have many interpretations that would make them impossible to satisfy, says political analyst Ross Darrell Feingold.
“I cannot conceptualize any situation where he would say there is nuclear safety, or a waste-management solution, or a public consensus,” Feingold told TOPICS. “He has built impossibility into his three-part test. It is simply impossible to achieve.”
Stanford’s Templeman disagrees, though. “The regulatory hurdles are one thing, but if there’s political pressure from the top, they will find ways around them,” he says. “It’s more a matter of political will.”
