Castilla-La Mancha celebrates the "banishment" of the single nuclear cemetery and the PP considers it a "tragedy"

The president of Castilla-La Mancha, the socialist Emiliano García-Page, celebrated this Wednesday that the central government has rejected the idea of ​​building a centralized temporary warehouse (known by the acronym ATC).

"We have definitely succeeded in banishing the nuclear graveyard," he said in reference to the silo that was projected in the Cuenca town of Villar de Cañas.

In 2011, one of the first executive decisions made by Mariano Rajoy (PP) upon arriving in La Moncloa was to choose the town of Villar de Cañas to build that silo.

The fact that his companion María Dolores de Cospedal governed Castilla-La Mancha at that time was key to finally designating that location among the four that were finalists.

Processing of the project began and doubts arose about the suitability of the land.

And when the PSOE returned to govern Castilla-La Mancha, it waged a war against the project.

Hence, García-Page has celebrated that the Government discards the construction of the ATC, which should serve to store the high-level radioactive waste from all the country's plants in a single location.

With a single sentence, the Ministry for the Ecological Transition resolves this nuclear soap opera that has been open for two decades: "The difficulties that arise in achieving the necessary degree of social, political and institutional consensus for the construction of a installation of this nature, for which it is considered unfeasible to have an ATC”.

This phrase appears in the draft radioactive waste general plan of the Government advanced by EL PAÍS this Tuesday, which buries the idea of ​​the ATC.

This implies that each of the seven existing nuclear power plants in Spain will now have to keep their own radioactive waste.

In other words, Spain will have seven nuclear cemeteries and not one centralized one.

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The Government rules out building a single nuclear cemetery and each plant will store its waste

At the moment, there are five plants in operation: one in the Valencian Community, another in Extremadura, two in Catalonia and one more in Castilla-La Mancha.

In this last community there is also a facility in the process of being dismantled and in Castilla y León there is another facility in a situation of definitive cessation of its activity.

Since a centralized silo is not going to be built, each one will have to keep its waste when it is dismantled for at least the next five decades.

From 2076, the government's waste plan contemplates that a deep geological repository be in operation, something that is still nothing more than a project for which there is no site.

While García-Page celebrated the decision on Wednesday, the president of the PP of Castilla-La Mancha, Paco Núñez, criticized the "radical environmentalism" of the PSOE and considered it "a tragedy and a disgrace" that the idea of ​​building the ATC in Villar de Canas.

Along the same lines, the PP national deputy Guillermo Mariscal has made it clear that his party's commitment is to go ahead with the installation of the Cuenca municipality, in which some 90 million euros have already been spent.

"A single location is more efficient economically than seven", summarized Mariscal, who recalled that this project began to roll with the PSOE in the central government.

Although the definitive location was approved by the PP in 2011, the idea of ​​having a single warehouse for all the waste was promoted by the PSOE of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero when it approved the previous general plan for radioactive waste, in 2006. Its Executive was the one that opened the process to choose the location, to which several municipalities of the country from different communities presented themselves.

Now the project is finally being ruled out, because no community has been willing to accept high-level radioactive waste from plants located in other regions.

Initially, Enresa, the public company in charge of managing this hazardous waste in Spain, clearly opted for the option of a single cemetery.

Basically, for a cost issue: building seven warehouses instead of a single ATC is 2,125 million euros more expensive.

If you look at the environmental impact, it was not so clear which option was better, since the most delicate moment is that of transportation and all the waste should be transferred from the nuclear facilities, explains Meritxell Bennasar, head of the nuclear campaign of the environmental organization Greenpeace.

Although the construction of a single warehouse was Enresa's preferred option —which is financed with the fees paid by the owners of the plants, which are the three large Spanish electricity companies—, the fact that this installation cannot be imposed on any community has made this entity resign.

Something similar to resignation is what they have communicated this Wednesday from Extremadura, where the Almaraz plant is located, the largest in the country.

"The Junta de Extremadura has positioned itself in favor of the construction of a single centralized temporary warehouse for all nuclear power plants," explained a spokeswoman for this regional government, which is also in the hands of the PSOE.

"This is the position that we officially moved last June in the public information period of the seventh nuclear waste plan," she adds.

But his proposal was that it be built outside of Extremadura.

“Given that this possibility is currently unfeasible as there is no necessary consensus, the logical consequence is the construction of seven temporary warehouses, one of them in Almaraz”, she points out.

“It is the only feasible alternative”, admits the Board.

For its part, Castilla y León, where the inactive Garoña plant is located, has accused the Government of “inefficiency”.

Sources from the regional Executive, shared by PP and Vox, have criticized the ministry for not being able to "reach an agreement to build a centralized nuclear cemetery."

"Once again, the Government of Spain is thrown aside so as not to face the management or make decisions", this community has criticized, reports

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