Does Anyone Know Anything About a 1999 "Dahan River Valley" Nuclear Research Reactor Pit Spill?

Arts & Sciences Culture & History
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I stumbled upon an article abstract during a goofing-around session, after Googling “Ta Han,” the old spelling of Dahan (except that I think the old spelling has a hyphen). Here’s a small sampling of an abstract similar to the one I found earlier:

[quote]Environmental 137Cs contamination was suspected from accidents at spent fuel storage pits of a research reactor site in the Ta-han River valley in Taiwan. In order to further characterize this contamination, soil samples were collected and measured by a gamma-spectroscopy system in 1999.[/quote]–Yuriy B. Nabyvanetsa, Thomas F. Gesellb, Min Hua Jena, Wushou P. Changa, “Distribution of 137Cs in soil along Ta-han River Valley in Tau-Yuan County in Taiwan,” Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, Volume 54, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 391–400

Wikipedia lists a couple of research reactors in Taiwan (one of which was apparently shut down in 1988, but I’m not sure that having been shut down eleven years earlier would rule out a spill–I also guess it’s possible that someone confused the 88th year of the Chinese Republic with 1988, which would mean the shutdown occurred in 1999). This links to that Chinese-language Wikipedia page.

The Wikipedia article linked above mentions TRIGAs. This links to an English-language Wikipedia article about TRIGAs.

The article linked below could be about that accident and its effects (and I’ve seen other Chinese-language Google results that look like they might contain some information about the matter), but as I’ve said before, I don’t know Chinese:

http://www.aec.gov.tw/newsdetail/newsprint/306-309-208.html

Anyway, does anyone know anything about it?

(Note to mods/admin: I put this in Culture and History because I wasn’t sure it really qualified as a Living in Taiwan topic, but it seemed too specific (because local) and a tad too much on the serious side to be posted in the Open Forum. But I’m okay with it going anywhere, including Temp.)

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It must be the place in Longtan, it’s near that river. The reactor may have closed, but waste is still being stored there

The article contains the phrase “twenty years after the incident” but I don’t see any incident referred to. Hmmm, maybe it means something like “the situation has been going on for over twenty years”.

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Thanks for the information, Tempo Gain!

:bow:

The Apple Daily says the author of the article you linked to is Hè Lìwéi (賀立維), and it mentions nuclear engineering and Iowa State University.

There’s a Taipei Times interview of two nuclear experts, one of whom is a 賀立維 whose English name is David Ho. Dr. Ho apparently got his doctorate degree in nuclear engineering at Iowa State.

In the Taipei Times interview, Dr. Ho says, among other things:

Here’s another Taipei Times article featuring Dr. Ho, in which he discusses problems of nuclear waste in Taiwan:

In the Apple Daily interview, Dr. Ho says:

Google Translate makes it look like he’s saying that the particular waste in question will be safe in about 300 years. Is that right?

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To be exact, “it will be at least 300 years before it reaches a safe level.”

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