Massive rally against N-power in Taiwan
20 May 2013 5:46 PM IST
Thousands of Taiwanese marched through the capital Taipei on Sunday urging the government to halt construction of a nearly completed nuclear power plant, citing the Japanese atomic crisis.
The demonstrators chanted slogans like ‘No Nuke for Our Children’ during the march which extended for miles as they evoked memories of the March 2011 Fukushima crisis sparked by an earthquake and tsunami.
Police estimates of the turnout were not immediately available while the organisers claimed 30,000 people took part. They said some protesters would hold an overnight sit-in outside parliament.
‘The Fukushima accident told us that a nuclear power plant is very risky,’ Lee Chou-lan, spokesman for the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union which organised the event, said.
Taiwan lies near the junction of two tectonic plates and is regularly hit by earthquakes. In September 1999 a 7.6-magnitude quake killed around 2,400 people in a deadly natural disaster.
The demonstrators chanted slogans like ‘No Nuke for Our Children’ during the march which extended for miles as they evoked memories of the March 2011 Fukushima crisis sparked by an earthquake and tsunami.
Police estimates of the turnout were not immediately available while the organisers claimed 30,000 people took part. They said some protesters would hold an overnight sit-in outside parliament.
‘The Fukushima accident told us that a nuclear power plant is very risky,’ Lee Chou-lan, spokesman for the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union which organised the event, said.
Taiwan lies near the junction of two tectonic plates and is regularly hit by earthquakes. In September 1999 a 7.6-magnitude quake killed around 2,400 people in a deadly natural disaster.
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