Restart nuclear power? Lai Qingde: If there is consensus, we will promote it. If there is no consensus, we will wait for advanced nuclear energy.

President Lai Ching-te gave an exclusive interview on Taiwan's economy with financial program host You Ting-hao, which was broadcast today. Regarding whether to restart nuclear power, the president made it clear that we do not want to be ideological and exclude any kind of energy. Then don’t ignore the sustainability of the environment just because of short-term interests. Therefore, as long as it is safe, nuclear waste can be solved, and there is social consensus, we will promote it.

Regarding the restart process of nuclear power, Lai Qingde said that because the Legislative Yuan law has been passed, the Taiwan Electric Power Company has also begun the restart process. Well, we are a democratic country and a society governed by the rule of law. We must also respect public opinion, so we will let the process take its course. In the end, it is left to the professionals to make the decision. Has nuclear safety met the standards? No one has any doubts about whether nuclear waste can indeed be solved. Is there a consensus in society? If there is consensus, then we will restart. If not, then of course we will wait for advanced nuclear energy.

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The host also asked whether the government has underestimated the power consumption issue in promoting the sovereign AI data center. Have you considered renewable energy? The president replied that our power supply is sufficient. But they are mainly petrochemical energy, natural gas, natural gas, and coal. Natural gas accounts for more than 40%, mainly petrochemical energy. Our renewable energy is about 13%, but it is still not enough. We must continue to improve, preferably to 30%, that is, to reach 30% or even higher by 2035. This is our goal.

Lai Qingde further said that our backup capacity today is about 20%, which means that our power generation every day is about 42 to 45 Gigawatts. Then if we use a backup capacity rate of 10 to 20%, that is what is left. We don’t want to use 20, we can just use 4%. That's about 4.4 Gigawatts. As for this AI computing power center, one Gigawatts is amazing. A Gigawatts computing power center is worth approximately US$40 billion, more than one trillion dollars. The country expects that around 2040, we will probably build a Gigawatts of computing power, which is what the country wants to build. For foreigners, there are probably hundreds, just dozens of Megawatts.

President Lai emphasized that for stable power supply, we include the electricity required for future economic progress, and then include the computing power centers and the computing power of the future cutting-edge computing. By 2035, there will basically be no problem.

Lai Qingde also said that he will steadily promote the development of artificial intelligence. We have proposed a new ten major construction projects for AI. There are four basic construction projects, which are talent cultivation. By 2040, we will train at least 500,000 AI application talents. The second one is to create a sovereign center for computing power and AI. The third one is stable power supply. The fourth one is that we want Taiwan to develop in a balanced way.