The The Government is considering keeping in Cofrentes the radioactive waste from the nuclear power station until 2088 in the face of difficulties in building a Centralized Temporary Warehouse that takes on waste from all over Spain. The Executive, which last week presented the country’s nuclear dismantling roadmap, is studying whether each of the seven Spanish plants has a Decentralized Temporary Warehouse to store the waste until the definitive solution is activated (which basically consists of burying all the waste at a point in Spain several kilometers deep). The Government project (included in the proposal for the 7th General Radioactive Waste Plan and its Strategic Environmental Study) specifies that Until December 31, 2020, Cofrentes accumulated 851 tons of spent uranium (which is highly polluting) and between now and the date of its closure in 2030 it will generate 24,914 cubic meters of low, medium and high level radioactive waste.
Spain initially opted to reprocess the waste from the first nuclear power plants (Vandellós I, José Cabrera and Santa María de Garoña) in facilities of France Y United Kingdom. This practice was discontinued in 1982 and it was decided that each Spanish plant would provisionally store the spent fuel (uranium) in its own pools. As a result of the first strategy, radioactive reprocessing waste was obtained which, depending on the contracts, had to be returned to Spain or not. Currently, radioactive waste from the reprocessing of spent fuel from the Vandellós nuclear power plant that remains in France must still return to Spain.
Cofrentes, which started operating in 1985, was storing all the uranium spent in the reactor in two pools located within the complex. The pools were at 98% occupancy last year, a situation that forced the construction of a dry temporary warehouse that is being used to leave free space in the pools so that the plant can continue operating.
The solution for the spent uranium was going to be the Centralized Temporary Warehouse planned in the Cuenca municipality of Villar de las Cañas, but two years ago the Government ruled out that location for the nuclear cemetery. The main problem is the citizen’s rejection of this type of nuclear warehouse. In this context, the Executive is now considering two alternatives: a Centralized Temporary Warehouse in another location or seven Distributed Temporary Warehouses (ATD) together with each of the seven Spanish nuclear plants.
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The 7th General Radioactive Waste Plan provides for the possibility that the Cofrentes, Almaraz, Ascó, Santa María de Garoña, José Cabrera, Trillo and Vandellós II plants have a warehouse with sufficient storage capacity to house all the waste generated during the operation of the plants and their dismantling. In parallel, regardless of the final solution, the Executive has given the green light to the expansion of the Cofrentes dry warehouse (as this newspaper reported in the summer) to save time.
The closure plan confirms that Cofrentes will stop in November 2030, dismantling will start in 2033 and the dismantling work will end in 2043.