Topic: The Great Choice of the Nuclear Power Plant No. 3 Restart Referendum, Reflecting Taiwan's "Governance OS Failure"

Everyone lives in governance and creates their own governance. With the third nuclear referendum to be held on August 23, the debate and discussion on the pros and cons has heated up again recently, but this article can make you think about the issue of social governance "away from one layer". (Synopsis: Nuclear power referendum 8/23 vote: five TV debates will be held, the Legislative Yuan is the right side, the Executive Yuan is the opposite) (Background supplement: Vitalik: I no longer believe that "optimal governance" can be achieved, economics is not perfectly in line with society) At the crossroads of electricity, Taiwan's nuclear power controversy is like a giant beast trapped in a maze, and each collision deepens the social rift. Nuclear Plant 3 and Nuclear Plant 4, two power plants with very different fates, are not so much energy facilities as they are "warning windows for failure" of Taiwan's operating system. This system is Taiwan's state-level mega-plan governance system, and the third nuclear plant is the product of successful operation in a relatively simple environment during the period of authoritarian stability of the Taiwan authorities. The fourth nuclear plant, on the other hand, is the catastrophic collapse of this outdated system as it tries to handle difficult tasks in an increasingly complex democratic era. Together, the two stories point to a disturbing truth, that the real tragedy of Taiwan's nuclear energy lies not in the presence or absence of technology, but in the fact that we have successfully introduced the "hardware" of nuclear energy (reactors, engineering technology) without ever establishing a matching "social software" that includes long-term stability policies, social trust, democratic communication mechanisms, and governance frameworks for solutions responsible for future generations. The current power demand anxiety triggered by the AI revolution makes us focus on hardware expansion again, but may once again ignore the "social software" that has long failed and is expected to be recharged. The "hardware" achievements of the third nuclear plant The third nuclear plant in Hengchun, southern Taiwan, is the epitome of Taiwan's economic miracle era. As a key part of the "Twelve Architectural Designs" in the 1970s, its birth carried the country's ambition for industrialization. Adopting the state-of-the-art pressurized water reactor technology at the time, it took seven years to build and operated stably for 40 years since 1984, providing indispensable baseload power for southern Taiwan. The smooth completion and reliable operation of the third nuclear plant can be regarded as Taiwan's exemplary work in introducing and operating cutting-edge technology "hardware". This success must be interpreted in its specific temporal and spatial context. In authoritarian times, the decision-making path for major construction was one-way and efficient: top-down, planned by technocrats, and driven by the will of the state. Concepts such as social communication and civic participation were not required in the governance system of the time. As a result, the construction and operation of the third nuclear plant can be completed in a relatively closed, low-interference environment, focusing on solving engineering and technical challenges. It proves that Taiwan is capable of navigating complex nuclear hardware, but this success also inadvertently obscures the neglect of "social software" in its governance model. This neglected aspect, thirty years later, when the third nuclear plant was faced with the choice of decommissioning or extending service, was wrapped up in a doubly complex problem and returned to the eyes of the Taiwanese people. If the history of the third nuclear plant is a documentary about technological success, then the story of the fourth nuclear plant is a tragic epic about the failure of governance. The nearly NT$300 billion, decades-long plant that has never generated a single kilowatt-hour of electricity is the most expensive lesson of Taiwan's democratic transition. Its failure is a systematic conflict between the "hardware thinking" of the old era and the "software requirements" of the new era. The original sin of the nuclear fourth began with its broken procurement model. Taipower abandoned the "turnkey" model of the first three nuclear power plants and instead assumed the general management of its own, buying designs from GE and subcontracting hundreds of subsystems to manufacturers around the world. This decision was tantamount to buying blueprints for an advanced aircraft, but making yourself chief engineer, purchasing engines, wings and avionics separately, and then trying to assemble them yourself. This approach not only overestimated its own integration ability, but also laid a fatal foreshadowing for the subsequent loss of quality control and management chaos. When this broken "hardware" assembly process collides with Taiwan's surging wave of democratization and political party rotation, the result is catastrophic. In 2000, the Chen Shui-bian government's hasty suspension of construction and subsequent resumption of work caused irreparable internal injuries to the project. For example, a series of scandals such as the reactor base cutting corners, Taipower's large-scale self-change of design without the consent of the original factory, and the difficulty of integrating the digital instrument and control system have completely hollowed out the public's trust. Nuclear Fourth was ridiculed by the media as a "assembly car", a metaphor that not only pointed out the technical assembly, but also pointed to the governance assembly, a lack of a strong and trusted chief designer to integrate the interests of different political forces, manufacturers and diverse public opinion. In the end, under the catalyst of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 and the veto of the 2021 referendum, this expensive "assembled car" was permanently mothballed, becoming a special monument in the history of Taiwan's governance, warning of the tragic price of the collapse of "social software". Unsolvable nuclear waste, the ultimate black hole of trust In all the debates about nuclear energy, the most unavoidable and powerful weapon of the anti-nuclear side is the disposal of nuclear waste. This is not only a technical problem, but also the most profound embodiment of the failure of Taiwan's governance "social software", a black hole that eats up all trust. The plight of high-level nuclear waste (used nuclear fuel) is the biggest pain in Taiwan's nuclear energy development. At present, all used fuel rods are temporarily stored in fuel pools that have long been on the verge of saturation in various plant areas. The medium-term transition from wet to dry storage has been delayed for many years due to the administrative jam of local governments and the "NIMBY" effect of the people. As for the final disposal site of nuclear waste, under the congenital conditions of Taiwan's narrow and densely populated and geologically active, even the legal basis for site selection is dead in place. Although the Ministry of Economy has put forward the goal of "opening the final disposal site by 2055", based on the lack of social consensus and trust, this is more like a distant political promise than an executable plan. Finland's success is a mirror of Taiwan's failure. The key to Finland's success in building Onkalo, the world's first final repository of advanced nuclear waste, lies not in technology, but in building a "social software" centered on trust, transparency, citizen participation and local vetoes. In Taiwan, on the other hand, nuclear waste disposal has long been dominated by the Taiwan authorities and Taipower, and the decision-making process is black box and citizen participation is a mere formality, resulting in a deep-seated public distrust of the competent authorities. The failure of this governance model has created a vicious circle. It's a cycle where there's no solution to nuclear waste, and any talk of nuclear energy seems irresponsible, and that image of irresponsibility, in turn, deepens the trust deficit. Unless Taiwan overhauls its nuclear waste governance framework and moves from technical persuasion to democratic consultation, the future of nuclear energy will remain trapped in this unsolvable impasse forever. Is the referendum a political ball game? In the face of a dysfunctional governance system, the referendum, a democratic tool that is supposed to compensate for the failure of representation and build social consensus, has been alienated into a political competition that intensifies confrontation and tears society apart on the issue of nuclear energy in Taiwan. Instead of fixing the failed "social software", it seems to install plugins that accelerate crashes on this bug-ridden system. After the 2018 Referendum Law lowered the threshold, the issue of nuclear energy became a new battleground for political party mobilization. In the 2018 "nuclear green" referendum, the nuclear pro-nuclear side won and abolished the non-nuclear home period in the Electricity Industry Law. In the 2021 "restart the fourth nuclear power" referendum, the anti-nuclear side successfully counterattacked and completely rejected the fourth nuclear power. And that is...