Brussels - The European Commission intends to propose EU- wide rules on the disposal of nuclear waste by the end of 2010, an official said Thursday.
'Nuclear waste management is an important area which needs to be addressed by both industry and national governments (...) the role of the EU is to set a common framework for the establishment of national waste management programs,' said Marlene Holzner, spokeswoman for energy commissioner Gunther Oettinger, during a briefing in Brussels.
Collective nuclear waste dumps, called European Regional Repositories, are to crop up in Eastern Europe, also in Poland, in the near future.
This is a joint EU initiative, currently developed in the European Repository Development Organization, of which Poland is a member. Negotiations on the construction of the collective geological repositories and the transport routes for nuclear waste are to begin in May. The talks are expected to last two years.
High-level nuclear waste from across the European Union could be shipped to eastern Europe for burial in a central underground storage facility under plans being considered by EU member states.
The Times has learnt that the project, which comes amid a resurgence of interest in nuclear power, could be given the green light later this year by the European Commission. Ewoud Verhoef, deputy director of Covra, the agency responsible for the storage of the Netherlands´ nuclear waste, said: "The nuclear programme in Holland is small and the cost of building a geological repository is very high. We only have one nuclear reactor in the Netherlands so there would be big advantages to a shared solution."
The Russian military allegedly dumped nuclear waste into the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s, according to a report on Swedish television.
Radioactive material from a military base in Latvia is thought to have been thrown into Swedish waters. For many the biggest shock is that the Swedish government may have known at the time and done nothing about it.
The partly enclosed Baltic Sea is known as one of the most polluted seas in the world. But now it seems it was also used as a dumping ground for Russian nuclear waste and chemical weapons.
The French nuclear industry is in turmoil as uranium supplies have dried up and the treatment of spent fuel has been blocked amid an increasingly bitter row between the heads of its two main state operators.
EDF, the electricity group that runs 58 reactors in France, said that Areva, the nuclear energy group, had stopped uranium deliveries on January 4 and was refusing to take away spent fuel for reprocessing.
The Western media reported last week on how the German company Urenco shipped nuclear material to Siberia, where the highly toxic waste was stored in containers in the open air. The company has stopped deliveries and will store the material with higher standards in Germany in the future.
The radiation warning sign was so small that few passers-by took note in the commuter rail station in Kapitolovo, Russia. Fifty-six steel canisters were sitting there on a summer day three years ago. Just a stone's throw away, people were waiting for trains to take them to downtown St. Petersburg.
PARIS (Reuters) - France's highly radioactive waste will more than double by 2030 mainly as spent fuel derived from nuclear reactors mounts up, the French national radioactive waste management agency (Andra) said on Tuesday.
Andra draws up every three years an inventory of sites polluted with radioactivity and details quantities per waste category as well as volume forecasts.
The threat of global warming has given a boost to the nuclear industry in many countries as one way to provide electricity without increasing carbon emissions. But what to do with the nuclear waste, especially the most toxic form - spent nuclear fuel. Nick Thorpe went to see how Bulgaria is coping.
Kiril Nikolov smiles a big, nuclear smile.
BRUSSELS — BRUSSELS: As France presses ahead with building more next-generation nuclear reactors, new evidence emerged Friday to suggest that industry and governments may be unprepared to handle the increasingly toxic waste that will result.
Highlighting the importance of the technology in France, both as its main source of electricity and as a major export industry, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France announced late Thursday that Électricité de France, Europe's biggest power producer, was awarded the contract to develop a second atomic reactor using next-generation technology.
The Labour leadership team at Cumbria county council has agreed to make an "expression of interest" that would pinpoint an area around the Lake District as the most likely place for Britain's first high-level nuclear waste dump.
The controversial move was taken on a vote of the council's inner cabinet amid allegations democracy was being stifled and despite a warning from a top scientist that new studies showed a link between atomic sites and incidents of cancer.
