Stone & Webster Inc. and Taiwan Power decided not to extend the contract following differences of opinion, said C.C. Yao, nuclear engineering director at Taiwan’s biggest electricity producer. The Shaw unit is also busy with projects in the U.S. and China, he said.

The Taipei-based state utility’s fourth nuclear power plant is two-thirds complete and will help ease an electricity shortage in northern Taiwan. Stone & Webster has provided design and engineering support for the plant scheduled to start in 2009.

“Stone & Webster started handing over work to us about half a year ago,” Yao said by phone yesterday from the project site at Kungliao in northern Taiwan. “We’ll look for a company we trust for a new contract.”

Chris Sammons, a spokesman for Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based Shaw Group, didn’t return a phone call to his office.

Stone & Webster has completed 98 percent of its work and its possible replacements include CTCI Corp. and Pacific Engineers & Constructors Ltd., both of which are Taiwan based, Yao said.

Taiwan Power, known as Taipower, operates three nuclear power plants with an installed capacity of 5,144 megawatts. Reactors met 19 percent of the island’s electricity demand in April, the company said on its Web site.

The fourth nuclear plant has two units with a planned capacity of 2,700 megawatts. The first is scheduled to start generation on July 1, 2009, and the second a year later, Yao said.

The government owns 97 percent of the utility, which generates about 75 percent of the electricity the island uses and has a monopoly on transmission in Taiwan.

Taipower has postponed the startup of the fourth nuclear plant three times, according to a 2006 report by the company. The project, first approved in 1981, probably won’t open until 2011, Liang Chi-yuan, an economist at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan’s state research institute, said in February.

Taipower’s nuclear plants supply about a fifth of the electricity on an island where the 200 earthquakes that strike in an average year have heightened public opposition to the use of reactors.

President Chen Shui-bian’s administration in October 2000 ordered Taipower to suspend building the fourth nuclear power plant because of opposition from residents near the site 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Taipei.

The government reinstated the project in February 2001, after the constitutional court ruled that the decision to halt construction was flawed because lawmakers weren’t consulted.

Taiwan sits along faults between the Philippine Sea and Eurasian Continental tectonic plates where quakes occur as the plates push together. On Sept. 21, 1999, a temblor with a magnitude of 7.6 and centered 150 kilometers south-southwest of Taipei killed 2,500 people.

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