March 2027

The first nuclear power plant to be built in Taiwan in over 30 years, the Lungmen Nuclear Power Plant achieved criticality in March 2027. The plant's opening marks a major defeat for the anti-nuclear movement in Taiwan, which just a decade earlier had been certain that nuclear power would be eliminated on the earthquake-prone island by 2025.

First proposed in 1978, Taipower finally broke ground on the Lungmen plant in 1999, with the goal of completing construction by 2004. Only, it was never completed. The 1999 Jiji Earthquake led legislators to inspect the construction process, where they were appalled by what they found, like rusty rebar and potential seawater seepage. When President Chen Shui-bian, the first non-KMT President in the country's history, was elected in 2000, he and the DPP made stopping the construction of the Lungmen Plant a key part of their platform.

What followed was a decade of construction delays, political grandstanding, and massive protests outside the gates of the plant. While the plant eventually finished construction and completed its safety tests in 2014, it was never activated, sitting in a mothballed state from thereon out at a cost of 1.3b NTD a year. When Taipower finally started shipping unused fuel rods back to the United States in 2018, it seemed like the plant was dead.

That changed when the Taiwanese people voted to reopen the plant in a 2021 Referendum. Legally binding, this referendum forced the government's hand. Since 2021, the various DPP governments have dedicated much of their energy to ensuring that the Lungmen Power Plant is as safe as possible before coming online. There were some ulterior motives for this: while the stated motivation was to make the plant as safe as possible when it finally came online, the real motivation, only ever mentioned behind closed doors, was to run up the operating and construction costs for the plant until they were so high that running the plant would be untenable for Taipower.

These efforts, much to the chagrin of elements of the DPP and the many protestors against the project, were unsuccessful. Six years after the project finally started back up, the Lungmen Nuclear Power Plant's two reactors finally came online. With a nameplate capacity of 2,700MW, the plant is expected to help reduce power costs in the country, along with reducing dependence on expensive imported coal (which is already being phased out) and natural gas.