Taipower Submits Formal Plan to Restart Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant

Taiwan Power Company delivered a restart plan for the Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant to the Nuclear Safety Commission on March 27, putting two idled PWR units in Pingtung County formally into the regulatory queue for the first time since their licenses expired in 2024 and 2025.

The submission package is comprehensive on paper: it covers a planned schedule, manpower allocation and training plans, reactivation and maintenance items, regulatory compliance planning, and a quality verification and audit plan. But before any substantive technical work begins, the NSC must first verify the documents are procedurally complete, a threshold check that precedes the weightier engineering review.

That engineering phase will not move quickly. Taipower and external partners are expected to conduct internal inspections spanning 1.5 to 2 years before the regulator could even consider reissuing an operating license. A physical restart cannot be scheduled until those inspections conclude, pass muster with the NSC, and a new license is formally granted. This is a multi-year process by any realistic measure.

The filing translates political momentum into regulatory action. President Lai Ching-te had said publicly earlier in March that two plants met conditions to consider reactivation, and Taipower's submission is the operational follow-through on those signals. Maanshan's two pressurized water reactor units sat idle not from a safety incident but from a scheduled phase-out under the prior government's nuclear exit policy, their licenses running out on a timetable set years in advance amid different geopolitical assumptions.

What the restart path actually looks like remains genuinely open. The scope of aging component modernization or outright replacement, the status of the trained operator workforce after years offline, and public acceptance are all unsettled variables. International partners, potentially including Westinghouse, may be needed for major inspections and technical validation, given the complexity of returning dormant PWR units to service after a cold shutdown period of this length.

If Maanshan ultimately clears the full regulatory process, it would stand as a concrete example of a jurisdiction reversing a formal phase-out under geopolitical pressure, a playbook other countries watching Taiwan's energy security calculus will study closely. The immediate milestones to track are the NSC's procedural completeness ruling and the early results of Taipower's internal safety inspections; those two data points will set the pace for everything that follows.