In May, Taiwan shuttered its last nuclear reactor, completing a process of denuclearization that had unfolded over four decades. In the mid-1980s, the island generated half its electric power from nuclear energy, an enterprise undertaken by the dictator Chiang Kai-shek in response to the oil shock of the 1970s. But once military rule ended, in 1987, antinuclear sentiment began to take hold. Taiwan’s early democratic activists feared that they could have a Chernobyl disaster of their own and