What happened
The timing captures the core tension in this whole policy area: a decision made in 2017 on largely environmental and post-Fukushima safety grounds reached its conclusion in 2025 under substantially changed strategic circumstances, with China's military pressure on Taiwan — including near-daily incursions into Taiwan's air defence identification zone and large-scale exercises simulating a blockade — significantly more acute than it had been eight years earlier. Nuclear power's specific strategic advantage in that context is that reactor fuel can be stockpiled domestically for extended periods, unlike the liquefied natural gas Taiwan increasingly relies on, which arrives by sea and would be the first target of any Chinese blockade.
The opposition KMT-controlled legislature's last-minute attempt to extend reactor licences came only in the final weeks before Maanshan 2's mandatory shutdown, too late procedurally to prevent it even after passing — a sequencing failure by the opposition as much as a policy choice by the governing DPP, since the amendment itself passed with cross-party support once the political consensus had shifted. The August 2025 referendum result is genuinely ambiguous evidence of public opinion: a majority of those who voted favoured restarting the reactor, but overall turnout did not clear the threshold Taiwanese referendum law requires for a binding result, meaning the vote demonstrates real but not decisive public appetite for reversing the phase-out.
This entry is attributed as mixed because responsibility is genuinely split across time and party lines: the original 2017 policy reflected legitimate environmental reasoning under different strategic conditions, the opposition's own delayed legislative response contributed to the shutdown proceeding as scheduled, and the current DPP government inherited a completed policy it did not originate but must now manage the consequences of.