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This article analyzes the development of nuclear power politics in Taiwan since 2016. In particular, it attempts to identify changing and/or recurring patterns of interaction between parties/politicians and civil society. Although more fluid forms of interest representation have emerged in recent decades, partisan strategies are still useful tools for social movements, especially as environmental/energy issues are highly politicized. Thus, existing institutional channels such as referendums and elections easily become battlefields for pro‐ and anti‐nuclear camps. How do the relevant actors in nuclear power politics interact regarding the current Democratic Progressive Party government's plan for a nuclear power phase‐out? While adopting a mechanism‐based approach, this article focuses specifically on explicating the interactions between parties/politicians and civil society. This article particularly highlights the role of civil society organizations and their activists, who straddle the line between political parties and civil society. These actors demonstrate both potential and limitations when it comes to changing the dynamics that exist between relevant actors in an iron triangle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major accident at a nuclear power reactor can lower public acceptance of this energy source and may result in a nuclear exit. This paper proposes an optimal power-generation planning model that deals explicitly with the costs involved in changing the power-generation mix due to a nuclear exit. The model introduces the probability of a major accident leading to a nuclear exit at a future time period as an endogenous variable, which is determined depending on the amount of nuclear power being generated during the preceding period. The proposed model is formulated as a stochastic programming problem that aims to minimize the expected value of overall power-generation costs computed with a weighted probability of every future state, branched according to a possible nuclear exit at each time period. An application of the model quantitatively implies that less nuclear dependency is optimal for a higher assumed frequency of a major accident per generated unit of electrical energy from nuclear—not only for the cost of direct damage from the accident, but largely because of the increased cost of overall power generation due to the subsequent nuclear exit. To put it differently, lowering the frequency of a major nuclear accident per reactor·year brings benefits exceeding the conventionally perceived effect of reducing an accident's direct damage. Lowering the major accident frequency to one per 10 6 reactor·years would free the optimal planning of future electricity supply from influence of an accident causing nuclear exit, if the geographical scale of the exit were limited to one-twentieth of the entire world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]