If weather permits, the pressurised reactor vessel will be installed at the power plant in northern Taiwan on Friday, a Taipower spokesman said.

Taipower Chairman Lin Ching-chi said this would be a "milestone development" in the project, which is 59 percent completed but 20 percent behind schedule.

The Japanese-built 1,000 tonne reactor vessel has been on site since June 2002, the first of two planned.

The project has been mired in controversy for years and got caught up in the political drama of the 2000 presidential elections which brought Chen Shui-bian of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to power.

In October 2000, the DPP scrapped the partly built 5.6-billion-US-dollar power plant without consulting parliament, as required by Taiwan's constitution, plunging the island into months of political crisis.

The DPP government, which had listed the scrapping of the project on its party platform, reinstated it in February 2001. The party opposed nuclear power on grounds of safety and difficulty in disposing of the waste.

Because of the delay, Taipower is estimated to need another 40 billion Taiwan dollars (1.3 billion US) for the project, with the extra spending waiting parliament's approval.

The first nuclear reactor had been scheduled to begin operation in July 2006 and the second in July 2007, with a total capacity of 2,770 megawatts.

Since Taiwan's first nuclear power plant started in 1987, its three nuclear power plants have generated at least 180,000 drums of low-radiation waste.

Taipower had planned to ship the waste to North Korea but was forced to halt the scheme under pressure South Korea and international conservationists.

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