Madrid (EFE).- The lawyer for Ecologistas en Acción (EA) José Ignacio Domínguez explained to EFE that in 1966, after the accident of the two US planes carrying nuclear weapons and crashed near Palomares (Almería), the United States it took “only 270 grams of the 9 kilos of plutonium that the weapons contained”, the rest “is scattered and buried in two large graves”.
The rest of the contaminating plutonium remains buried in two trenches that were opened, one of 1,000 meters and another of 3,000 meters, according to Domínguez.
In the opinion of EA’s lawyer, the administrations “have not done anything” to fight against the contamination that caused the fall of the two bombs from two US planes, and “they only dedicated themselves, between 2007-2011, to fencing the area.”
The announcement of a new negotiation for the transfer of contamination is a “delaying maneuver, it is part of the electoral campaign, it is already a classic”, according to Domínguez, since “they did it in 2015 with the signing of a declaration of intentions between the then Spanish Foreign Minister, José Manuel García-Margallo, and the United States Secretary of State, John Kerry”.
“There is a lot of evidence that they do not want to clean up,” according to EA’s lawyer, who added that “the plutonium does not need to be taken by the Americans, that is the excuse they use for not cleaning up.”
What they must do is “put all the radioactive product in drums and store it in an individualized temporary warehouse (ATI), as all nuclear power plants do, and then negotiate where they take it.”
Reactivated the Palomares cleaning file
There is more evidence that “there is no political will to act”, he stressed, because “we have filed a complaint with the European Commission and the State lawyer has opposed joining it”.
Spain has demanded that the US take the land contaminated with plutonium from the nuclear accident in accordance with the commitment that Madrid and Washington signed in 2015 for its transfer to the Nevada desert.
The Spanish government has reactivated the file for the cleanup of the Almería municipality affected by the nuclear incident 57 years ago, according to what the newspaper El País published on Monday, citing diplomatic sources.
According to EA’s lawyer, the value of the cleaning and transportation to the US “is valued at 30 million euros according to 2010 values. This was approved by the European Commission, the Nuclear Safety Council (CSN) and the Center for Energy Research, Environmental and Technological (Ciemat)”, he said, “but now they argue that it is 640 million euros”.
“They want to make one more road to increase the cost (within the land transport operation) and say that it is not cleaned,” he stressed.
Five points outside the fenced area with radioactivity
The complaint presented to the European Commission states that “there are five points outside the fenced area that have as much radioactivity as the area that is inside, there is even a sidewalk on Calle Disseminado de la Punta that is unpaved and has 400 Bq/m2 , when the maximum is one”.
The CSN and the Ciemat turn a “blind eye”, while “land outside the fence is also being expropriated”. “They knew that there was contamination because contamination does not remain fixed, plutonium moves with wildlife, rabbits take it attached to their fur, the wind moves it, the fence does not prevent it from moving, and there is no surveillance. ”.
“It is said that most of the contamination has been carried away by the US. One of the fallacies that they have launched”, she assured, because “they only took 1,000 cubic meters” and “now they have to clean 50,000 m3”, she lamented.
For her part, Greenpeace spokeswoman Meritxell Bennasar pointed out that housing construction is getting closer to contaminated areas and recalled that both her organization and EA have denounced the contamination brought about by earth movements, which make the microparticles come to the surface and are blown away by the wind.