Jinshan was one of the Ten Major Construction Projects, a sweeping infrastructure program launched by Premier Chiang Ching-kuo to modernize Taiwan in the 1970s. The plant used General Electric boiling water reactor technology, and its two units were among the smallest in Taiwan's eventual nuclear fleet. Commercial operations began in December 1978, making Jinshan the foundation upon which Taiwan built an energy strategy that, at its peak in the mid-1980s, drew over half the island's electricity from nuclear fission. But from the start, the plant carried the weight of what had been sacrificed to build it -- a village erased, a community uprooted, all in the name of progress and energy security.

The plant's later years read like a catalog of close calls. In July 2013, Typhoon Soulik knocked Unit 2 offline when a snapped ground line struck the transmission cables. The storm choked the seawater inlet with debris and wrecked three fine filters, the travelling filter rake, and the switchyard. Weeks later came a more troubling revelation: radioactive water may have been seeping from the spent fuel storage pools for as long as three years. Taipower, the state-owned operator, insisted the water had been collected and recycled, posing no environmental threat. Then in December, the second reactor's circulating pump tripped on low lubricant oil pressure, and the Atomic Energy Council took ten hours to inform the public. In August 2016, smoke billowed from the plant after unstable voltage tripped external circuit breakers. Each incident deepened public distrust.

By the time decommissioning planning began, Jinshan's spent fuel pools held over 6,100 assemblies between them -- nearly at maximum capacity of 3,083 per pool. Taipower submitted its decommissioning plans to the Atomic Energy Council by December 2015, with a mandate to fully dismantle the facility within 25 years of shutdown. The reactors went dark in 2019, but the work of taking the plant apart will stretch into the 2040s. The spent fuel remains on site, a radioactive inheritance that Taiwan is still figuring out how to manage. Jinshan's story did not end when the turbines stopped spinning. It simply entered a quieter, longer, and in some ways more difficult chapter.

Today the Jinshan coast is in transition. The cooling water outfall that once warmed a patch of ocean has gone silent. Where the Lien family's village once stood, and where reactor containment buildings rose in its place, the slow process of decontamination and dismantlement grinds forward. Taiwan's nuclear story has moved on -- the island's last reactor, at Maanshan in the far south, shut down in May 2025, closing the nuclear chapter entirely. But Jinshan remains the place where it all began: where a small island bet on the atom during a global energy panic, and spent the next half century wrestling with the consequences.