A Hundred Thousand Drums on Orchid Island
In 1974 the atomic energy council placed the storage site for low-level radioactive waste at Longmen, on the south-eastern corner of Orchid Island. The island then had a population of about three thousand, all of them Tao, lay some forty-odd nautical miles off Taitung, had no electricity supply, and had no document that would have let anyone living there read the decision.
Construction began in 1978. What went round the island was that a fish cannery was being built. Tao memory on this point is close to unanimous; the government has never conceded saying it. But the cabinet's inquiry report of 2019 did establish one thing: at no stage of the siting or the building was there any procedure that informed the residents.
In May 1982 the first consignment came ashore. For fourteen years the drums went in one at a time, against a design capacity of a hundred thousand, and stopped at a little over ninety-seven thousand. They hold low-level waste from medicine, from research and from the running of the nuclear stations, stacked in concrete trenches and capped over.
In 1987 people on the island began asking what this was. In February the following year the Tao marched for the first ti…
In 1987 people on the island began asking what this was. In February the following year the Tao marched for the first time, and called what they were doing the expulsion of the evil spirits. That was not a figure of speech. Anito, in the Tao language, are specific things that bring sickness and death. They named the matter in their own word because they had no share in the official one.
The last consignment went in during 1996, and it stopped there. The government undertook to move the site, and the deadline was put back and put back. The drums are where they were. When they were opened and repacked in 2011, some were found rusted through, and the repacking took several more years.
On 1 August 2016 the president apologised to the indigenous peoples on behalf of the state, and one passage of the text was about Orchid Island. The inquiry report followed in 2019 and retrospective compensation began to be paid. From the siting decision of 1974 to that report is forty-five years.
The island now has power, convenience stores and tourists, and several flights a day. The storage site is on the south-eastern stretch of the ring road, and passing it you see the wall and the notice at the gate. Guides do not usually stop, because it is not on the itinerary. The islanders, speaking of that place, still use the word they chose for it themselves in 1988.
There is no word for radiation in the Tao language, and that is not a defect of the language — the thing had not been on the island. When it was landed, the only word available for it was anito: unseen, bringing sickness, to be driven off. The press wrote up the action of February 1988 as a protest. What the islanders did was more specific than that: they put on the armour, took up the spears, and faced that direction. The form was repeated many times afterwards, and each time it struck outsiders as very photogenic. The form was never for the photographs. The way it is put on the island is that nobody was asked when the anito came in, so nobody need be asked about driving it out.
Isle of Time