Representative to Japan Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) wrote a post on his Facebook page on Saturday, in which he said that trace quantities of radioactive elements are actually good for one’s health.
He gave as examples the hot springs in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投) and the Tamagawa hot spring in Japan’s Akita Prefecture, which are the only places on Earth known to have a special kind of rock called hokutolite. Hokutolite, which is named after the Japanese pronunciation of the name “Beitou,” contains traces of radium, and Hsieh said that research shows this rock to be beneficial for one’s health.
Interestingly, some Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) politicians had a knee-jerk reaction to Hsieh’s post about the quality of these hot springs.
They interpreted his post as supporting Japan’s release into the sea of water containing tritium from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, which was shut down after an accident in March 2011.
Some critics suggested that if Hsieh thinks there is nothing wrong with the tritiated water from Fukushima, maybe he would like to go ahead and drink it every day.
However, these KMT politicians have made two kinds of mistakes, namely word substitution and self-contradiction.
Firstly, Hsieh’s post was about hot springs and made no mention of Fukushima at all, yet his critics are determined to conflate these two issues. This is a very unscientific attitude. In addition to not being conducive to any discussion, such an attitude could be interpreted as deliberately misleading.
Secondly, according to the KMT’s logic, anyone who thinks that there is nothing wrong with something should have to prove it by touching that thing every day.
If so, why is no KMT politician willing to live next door to a nuclear power station? Why does New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) support nuclear power now that he is campaigning as the KMT’s prospective presidential candidate, whereas when campaigning for the New Taipei City mayoral election, he said he would not allow nuclear waste from the city’s two nuclear power stations to be stored within the city?
Actually, in both cases — hot springs on the one hand and tritiated water from Fukushima on the other — there are scientific instruments that can check whether the water quality meets international standards and what effect the waters might have on the human body.
Unfortunately, given an opportunity to teach the public a thing or two about science, these KMT politicians prefer to vilify a particular person based on their own prejudices.
Huang Wei-ping works in public service.
Translated by Julian Clegg
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS