Nuclear waste on the Galician coast

Subject: Nuclear waste on the Galician coast

More than 140 000 tonnes of nuclear waste, in over 220 000 transport containers that are unsuitable for storing such material, was dumped in a nuclear landfill on the Galician coast. In 2018 the voluntary moratorium on dumping radioactive waste at sea from 1982 – which was followed by a ban in 1993 – runs out. The Member States are obliged to conduct constant monitoring of radioactivity levels in their water resources and transmit this information to the Commission. The Commission participates in the work of the OSPAR Radioactive Substances Committee and provides support for the work on other regional conventions. However, no major update of these rules is currently under way.

Can the Commission say when the most recent checks on the Galician Atlantic landfill site were carried out and give a timetable for the next review?

Can the Commission supply the data provided by Spain?

Answer given by Mr Arias Cañete on behalf of the European Commission (3 August 2018)

The Honourable Member seems to refer to deep sea disposal of nuclear waste between 1949 and 1982 that, however, according to our information occurred outside Spanish territorial waters. The Commission is not aware of any ongoing programmes to inspect the state of the waste containers referred by the Honourable Member or studies on their impact on the maritime environment.

However, as the Commission pointed out in its reply to Written Question E-002218/2018, the Coordinated Research and Environmental Surveillance Programme (CRESP) monitored the marine radioactivity relating to sea disposal of radioactive waste in the North Atlantic for several years until 1990 (1) while the Commission carried out a study in 2003 on the radiological exposure of the EU from radioactivity in North European marine waters (2).

As also explained in the reply to E-002218/2018, the Oslo/Paris (OSPAR) Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic and the International Atomic Energy Agency continue to monitor radioactive discharges and levels of marine radioactivity in the North Atlantic. Further information is available on their websites (3).

⋅1∙ Coordinated research and environmental surveillance programme related to sea disposal of radioactive waste, CRESP activity report 1986-1990, OECD Nuclear

Energy Agency, 75 — Paris (France).

⋅2∙ MARINA II, 2003. Update of the MARINA Project on the radiological exposure of the European Community from radioactivity in North European marine waters;

https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/radiation-protection-publications. European Commission, Radiation Protection 132, 2003. ⋅3∙ https://www.ospar.org/work-areas/rsc and https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:47013685. See, for instance, Inventory of Radioactive Material

Resulting from Historical Dumping, Accidents and Losses at Sea For the Purposes of the London Convention 1972 and London Protocol 1996, IAEA TECDOC No 1776, 2015.