In the early 1970s, planners in Taipei began looking for somewhere to put Taiwan's nuclear waste. The island's three nuclear power plants were generating material that needed a long-term home. The search eventually settled on a location at the southeastern tip of Orchid Island — Pongso no Tao, the island the Tao people have called home for centuries. The Tao were not consulted in any meaningful way. Construction began in 1978. The first drums of waste arrived in May 1982. The Tao have been asking for the waste's removal ever since.
The Atomic Energy Council formed a task group in the early 1970s to identify sites for a temporary storage facility for low- and mid-level nuclear waste. The decision to use the Longmen area of Orchid Island was made in 1974; the Executive Yuan approved the construction plan at the end of 1975. Harbor construction started in 1978, and the storage facility — initially named the Lanyu Storage Site — followed in 1980.
What happened in the Tao community during these years remains disputed. According to Mei-lan Xia-tian, a guide from the Tao community, the government did not inform Tao residents that nuclear waste was to be stored on their island. She has described a deception: officials told the community that a pineapple canning factory would be built, offering economic development as the frame for what was actually happening. Elderly community members, she said, gave written consent without being able to read Chinese. The Atomic Energy Council has disputed this account, stating that official project documents always identified the facility as a nuclear waste storage site and that a notice board at the construction site named it as such. What is not disputed is that the Tao community did not give informed, free consent to a decision that permanently altered their home.
Between May 1982 and February 1996, the Lanyu Storage Site accepted 97,672 drums of low-level radioactive waste. Of these, 86,380 came from Taiwan's three nuclear power plants and 11,292 came from various other sources. In February 1996, the site stopped accepting new waste.
The drums are stored in concrete trenches at the southeastern tip of the island, a location chosen partly because natural hills on three sides and the Pacific Ocean on the fourth create a physical buffer between the facility and the nearest residential areas. The trenches are 4.5 meters high — three meters underground, 1.5 meters above — with the base lined in concrete and reinforced concrete. Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) has operated the site since July 1990, when it took over from the Atomic Energy Council's Office of Radioactive Waste Management. In 2018, the facility was officially renamed the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Storage Site.
The Tao's opposition to the facility has been persistent and public. They did not choose to be the host community for waste generated by power plants that serve mainland Taiwan's industrial economy. They did not benefit from that economy in proportion to what they were asked to bear. Protests on Orchid Island have continued for decades — demonstrations at the facility, demands made to successive governments in Taipei, appeals to public attention on an island that most Taiwanese know mainly as a tourist destination.
The waste removal question has proven intractable. The facility was built as temporary storage; finding a permanent disposal site acceptable to any community anywhere in Taiwan has remained politically impossible for the Taiwanese government across multiple administrations. Meanwhile, the drums stay. Some have shown signs of deterioration. Taipower reports ongoing monitoring of the surrounding environment and radioactivity levels, and describes the current state of the facility as managed and contained. The Tao describe it as an ongoing injustice imposed on their home without their consent and maintained without their agreement to continue bearing it.
Orchid Island is not simply a storage location. It is Pongso no Tao — the island of the people — home to the Tao, an Austronesian people whose culture, language, and way of life developed in relative isolation across centuries of Pacific island living. Their traditional knowledge of the sea, their distinctive wooden fishing canoes painted in geometric red, white, and black patterns, their Flying Fish Festival and the ecological intelligence it encodes — all of this belongs to a community that did not ask to share their home with the waste of an industrial economy they did not build.
The southeastern tip of the island where the storage site sits is a few kilometers from the residential communities, separated by the hills that planners noted as natural barriers. The Tao know exactly where the facility is. They have lived with the knowledge of its presence — and the unresolved question of when it will leave — for over forty years. The waste remains. The island waits.
The Low-Level Radioactive Waste Storage Site sits at approximately 22.005°N, 121.594°E at the southeastern tip of Orchid Island (Lanyu), accessible via Lanyu Airport (RCLY) on the island's northern coast. Flying from the airport south along the eastern coast, the facility is visible as a fenced complex in a natural bowl framed by hills on three sides and the Pacific on the fourth. Orchid Island lies 77 kilometers southeast of Taitung on the Taiwan mainland. Approach the southern tip of the island from altitude — the storage site occupies the most exposed, remote corner of this already remote island. The surrounding ocean is Pacific-deep; the island's volcanic mountains rise steeply to the west. Typhoons cross this area frequently; the facility was designed with that in mind.