Spain’s government and its municipalities within 10 kilometres of the country’s nuclear power station network, including the ageing Almaraz plant, have signed an agreement to improve safety protocols "in case of a nuclear emergency."
The agreement provides, among other measures, for technical support to councils, information programmes for local populations, and theoretical and practical training for technicians in emergency plans and drills.
The agreement signed today establishes the basis for cooperation between the Directorate-General for Civil Protection and Emergencies and the Association of Municipalities in Nuclear Plant Areas and provides for the creation of a joint monitoring committee composed of four representatives appointed by the Ministry of the Interior and by the association, which shall meet at least twice a year.
The Almaraz nuclear power plant, recently visited by a Portuguese technical delegation, on a trip at which environmental association observers were banned, is located 100 kilometres from the national border.
Spain decided to build a radioactive waste dump at the Almaraz plant, which uses water from the Tagus river for cooling, so Portugal lodged a complaint with the European Commission as there had been no cross-border environmental impact study of the new facility. The concern is that any nuclear leak into the Tagus will flow down the Tejo through Portugal, causing nuclear contamination as the river winds its way to the coast.
In February, the European Commission announced that the Portuguese and Spanish governments reached an "amicable settlement" to the litigation, with Lisbon withdrawing its complaint to Brussels, albeit under intense pressure from EC president Jean-Claude Juncker.
Despite criticism from environmentalists and political parties in Portugal, which claimed that this agreement represented a retreat by the Portuguese, the Foreign Minister, Augusto Santos Silva and the Environment Minister, João Matos Fernandes disagreed and tried their best to pitch this as a great victory.
The ministers, under political pressure to end the dispute and play down the environmental threat posed by the ageing power plant, argue that at the end of the two months of joint work, with Spain undertaking to inform Portugal about the construction and operation of the warehouse and its possible effects, the work will be evaluated and if the results are inconclusive the Portuguese Government may re-submit its complaint to the European Commission.
Environmentalists fear that the construction of the spent nuclear fuel dump indicates that Spain is preparing to extend of the operation of the nuclear power station beyond its decommissioning date of 2020.
