Over 13,000 people gathered in Taiwan’s capital of Taipei to protest against using nuclear power industry, Kyodo news agency said on Saturday.
The protesters urged the country’s authorities to develop alternative energy sources in order to prevent further nuclear disasters, similar to the one at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant.
The future of the nuclear energy industry came into the spotlight after a series of accidents at Fukushima nuclear plant, which was seriously damaged in explosions and fires following an earthquake and tsunami on March 11 .
Fukushima’s operator has since been struggling to stop radioactive leaks from the plant’s crippled reactors. Almost 80,000 people living within the evacuation zone were forced to flee their homes.
Taiwan has three working nuclear power plants, and is going to launch the fourth one.
The protesters demanded to shut down the operational plants and to turn the new facility into a museum to show the risks of nuclear energy.
Taiwan is regularly hit by the quakes as it lies in a seismically dangerous area, near the junction of the Eurasian tectonic plate and the Philippine Sea plate.
MOSCOW, April 30 (RIA Novosti)