Be quiet. Perhaps it is the word that best sums up everything that surrounds the soils contaminated by nuclear accidents in Spain. Silence during the dictatorship, but also in democracy. Because ministries and public bodies with competence in this matter —such as the Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research (Ciemat) and the Nuclear Safety Council (CSN)— continue to remain silent or pass the ball to each other. An important part of the problem lies in the fact that the different central governments have kept in a drawer for more than a decade a modification of the Law on Nuclear Energy, a Francoist norm that is still in force. This change in the 1964 law is necessary so that in Spain a land contaminated by radioactivity can be officially declared and thus end the existing legal vacuum.
The Government of Pedro Sánchez has now committed itself in its 2022 regulatory annual plan to finally approve this modification that will allow an official inventory of the affected areas to be drawn up. At the moment, the CSN recognizes six sites, among which are the Jarama canal —where there are clandestine burials of radioactive sludge resulting from a leak in 1970 from an experimental reactor located in Madrid— and Palomares —the Almeria district on which several nuclear bombs in 1966. Also others that “present radioactivity” either due to accidents or industrial activities, as is the case of the Phosphogypsum pools in Huelva.
The inclusion of this modification in the 2022 regulatory plan comes after the European Commission sent the Government a reasoned opinion in June in which it threatens to take Spain to the EU Court of Justice if it does not comply with Directive that obliges member countries to have control and monitoring strategies for areas contaminated by radioactivity. The States must delimit them and establish the measures for their decontamination or to restrict the uses of the soil, according to that 2013 directive that Spain continues to fail to comply with. The CSN also sent the Executive a letter this summer recalling the need to modify the 1964 law, according to sources familiar with this case. This body requested the same thing at the beginning of the last decade from the PP government, which in 2014 even drafted that reform but did not approve it either.
Once this modification has been carried out, which the Senate also demanded from the Executive in 2018, the Government, through a royal decree, should establish the necessary criteria to prepare the inventory of affected areas and the strategies that must be followed in each case for their decontamination or limitation of uses based on the data collected by the CSN.
But, while that promised reform of the law and that inventory arrives, the areas affected by radiological contamination remain in legal limbo. In some cases they are not even marked or fully characterized despite the fact that the CSN has recognized that there is a presence of radioactivity. This is the case, for example, with the burials of the sludge with Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 that exist at various points in the Jarama irrigation canal.
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In November 1970, several dozen liters of highly radioactive liquid from the experimental reactor at the Juan Vigón National Nuclear Energy Center, located in the University City of Madrid, ended up in the sewers. The discharge flowed through the Manzanares, the Jarama, the irrigation channel of this river and, finally, the Tagus. The Franco regime tried to hide the accident and carried out a cleaning operation in the irrigation canal – farmers in the area were told that the spill had been diesel. The ditch was drained and part of the contaminated land went to the El Cabril warehouse in Córdoba. But another part was secretly buried in at least eight ditches along the same canal, known as Bantas del Jarama.
These nuclear waste cemeteries remained secret until September 2018, when EL PAÍS revealed their existence. At that time, the Ciemat and the CSN —the two inheriting bodies of the former Francoist Nuclear Energy Board that was responsible for the accident and the cleanup— formed a working group. According to sources familiar with the work of this group, the CIEMAT in the last year has carried out a characterization of the area with georadar. But the Ciemat, dependent on the Ministry of Science, refuses to officially give any information about these tasks and maintains that it should be the CSN that reports. And the CSN maintains that it is waiting for the CIEMAT to transfer the study on the characterization of these clandestine burials.
While these two organizations pass the ball, three and a half years after the formation of that group, the land in which the nuclear waste was clandestinely buried continues without marking or delimiting. When the existence of the cemeteries was revealed in 2018, both the CIEMAT and the CSN assured that the levels of radioactivity in the sidewalks were no longer dangerous for humans. But there is no official and public recognition that these lands are decontaminated, nor that they are contaminated, because the reform of the 1964 law that would allow it has still not been approved. Sources from both organizations blame this legal vacuum for the fact that no action has been taken on these lands, such as fencing, cleaning or its official declaration as a safe area.
In the 2022 regulatory plan for La Moncloa, it is stated that the Ministry for Ecological Transition is responsible for reforming the Law on Nuclear Energy. But this department only admits that it is going to change this year to “introduce the definition of radiologically contaminated land” and that this will allow the CSN to draw up the inventory of the affected land, explains a spokesman for the ministry.
Who is responsible?
Silence has been a constant in another of the emblematic cases of contamination after a nuclear accident: Palomares. The complete cleanup of the area affected by the fall of the atomic bombs after the accident of the two US planes in 1966 is still pending. As in the case of Jarama, the affected ministries and agencies evade responsibility. José Ignacio Domínguez, an environmental lawyer, knows this well. Together with Ecologists in Action, he asked the court to order the decontamination. This summer the National Court ruled out forcing the affected area to be cleaned and based its decision on an “incorrect articulation” of the demand. Basically, the magistrates argued that the CSN, which the environmentalists asked to decontaminate Palomares, “is not the competent body to which they should go.”
So Domínguez wrote to the Council of Ministers to ask the government to carry out the cleanup. In two days he had his answer: on July 14, the Ministry of the Presidency replied that it was not a matter of its competence and that “the question” would affect “the scope of competence” of Ecological Transition. So Domínguez wrote to that other ministry and, only five days later, he had his brief response: “It is communicated that on July 19, 2021 your request is transferred to the Ciemat, because it is within its competence.” And on July 27, the reply came from the Ciemat, which assured that “it does not have the capacity to carry out the decontamination of the land.” So who is responsible?
Domínguez regrets this “administrative pilgrimage”, which has now led him to appeal the ruling of the National High Court to the Supreme Court to clarify who is responsible and to set a deadline for the decontamination of Palomares. “We do not know who is competent, everyone washes their hands”, summarizes this lawyer about the legal limbo in which soils contaminated by radioactivity are in Spain.
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