Taiwan will halt the construction of a nuclear power plant that had met with public opposition and raised concerns about safety, the governing party has announced.
The decision followed several large protests in Taipei and a hunger strike by a former leader of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party.
The move was announced on Sunday after a meeting of county and city officials from the governing party, the Kuomintang, which is headed by President Ma Ying-jeou.
Work on the Lungmen nuclear plant, which would be Taiwan’s fourth, started more than a decade ago in the island’s northeast, about 20 miles outside the capital, Taipei. It has been frequently delayed, and opposition to the project intensified following the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.
The government has argued that the plant, which is expected to supply about 10 percent of Taiwan’s power, is needed to help meet growing demand for electricity. But Mr. Ma has seen his popularity fall to near all-time lows in recent months, and he has faced strong opposition on many policy fronts. An effort to push through legislative approval of a trade deal with China was thwarted after student-led protesters occupied the legislature for more than three weeks in March and April.
The Kuomintang announcement said that the first reactor on the Lungmen plant, which is near completion, would undergo safety testing and then be mothballed. Work will stop on the second reactor, and a referendum will then be held to determine whether the plant, also commonly known as No. 4, will be completed and go online, the announcement said.
Taipower, the state-run utility that is building the plant at a cost of more than $9 billion, says the first reactor is more than 95 percent finished and the second more than 90 percent. Taipower’s chairman, Hwang Jung-chiou, told Taiwan’s state-owned Central News Agency that stopping construction of the plant would force the company to declare bankruptcy.
Mr. Ma met last week with the opposition party chairman, Su Tseng-chang, to discuss a referendum, and while both sides agreed that a vote should be held, they differed on the timing and on what level of voter turnout should be required to validate any result. Mr. Su had argued that the vote should be held as soon as possible, with a lower threshold than the 50 percent turnout normally required.
On Sunday, Mr. Su called the Kuomintang announcement on the plant vague and said it should come from a government body. He called on Prime Minister Jiang Yi-huah to explain the decision as soon as possible.
Mr. Jiang confirmed the decision on Monday, saying that the move to halt construction was not the same as abandoning the project and that the government wanted to keep open the possibility of adding nuclear power capacity in the future.
Protesters had taken to the streets of Taipei over the weekend to demand that construction of the plant be stopped. On Sunday, tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered near the Presidential Office Building, chanting “Stop Nuclear Plant No. 4, Return Power to the People.” They festooned the barbed wire barricades surrounding Mr. Ma’s office with yellow and black ribbons displaying their slogan. Organizers said about 50,000 protesters participated; the police estimated the crowd at 28,500 at its peak.
“Taiwan has lots of earthquakes, and we put these nuclear power plants next to the sea,” said Lin Chin-lung, a 47-year-old who works in finance and first joined the antinuclear demonstrations last year. “The earthquake in Japan, that was important in making people pay attention to the risks we’re talking about.”
The protesters marched to a main street near the central train station on Sunday afternoon. The police used water cannons to disperse some of the demonstrators in the early hours of Monday morning.
The protesters say they were inspired in part by Lin Yi-hsiung, a former chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party, who began a hunger strike against the nuclear plant on April 22. Mr. Lin, 72, was staging his hunger strike at Gikong Presbyterian Church, located in a house where Mr. Lin’s mother and twin daughters were stabbed to death in 1980. Those killings, which have never been solved, occurred while Mr. Lin was in detention on sedition charges related to his pro-democracy activism.
Mr. Ma and Mr. Jiang both visited the church but were unable to meet with Mr. Lin.
“I respect what Lin Yi-hsiung is doing,” said Huang Hui-chang, a 60-year-old retired construction worker who joined the antinuclear demonstration on Sunday. “But we are still waiting to see if it will have any effect on Ma Ying-jeou.”