The Nuclear Safety Center has admitted that there are several radioactive sites. An inventory of soils contaminated by this phenomenon has been awaited for ten years.
The Nuclear Safety Center (CSN) released in early October a list of up to six sites with radioactivity in Spain, outside the authorized facilities. According to the CSN, there is no significant radiological risk at these locations and they have been acting at each of them when necessary “to guarantee the radiological protection of the population and the environment”.
This list is published after the controversy surrounding radioactive soils that was created after the news in the newspaper El País about the Jarama ditches, where the dictatorship hid radioactive sludge from a leak of the Ciemat (Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas). It has been learned that there are several ditches on the banks of the irrigation canal with traces of Cesium137 and Strontium90, without any signage.
These sites and others should be included in an “inventory of land or water resources affected by radiological contamination” that Royal Decree 35/2008 on the regulation of nuclear and radioactive facilities required to be drawn up. A decade later, this inventory has not yet seen the light of day although, as a result of the new controversy, the Ministry for Ecological Transition has committed to carry it out.
The CSN defends that the approval of this catalog requires the modification of the nuclear energy law to include the definition of contaminated land in terms of levels, as well as the responsibilities for these lands and their subsequent restoration. They also point out the need to trace the “suspect lands” of having been contaminated in the past, since most of them are the result of practices carried out years ago.
The CSN list includes locations such as Palomares (Almería), Río Tinto (Huelva), Flix (Tarragona) and the aforementioned Canal del Jarama (Madrid and Toledo) and different elements, among them the aforementioned Cesium137 and Strontium90, Plutonium 239, Americium 241, Radium 226 and Uranium 238. It also mentions that in Spain there are old metallic material mines where “the presence of radioactive material could be considered for the restoration and subsequent use of the land”.
Soil contaminated by radioactivity is once again on the country’s political and media agenda, pending an inventory to determine the real situation and take the necessary measures.
