Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-07-04-Speech-2-385"
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"en.20060704.35.2-385"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, I thank you for your interesting view. This report was adopted by the committee with a very large majority, and I wish to thank the committee members, who tabled many good amendments to the proposal, for their very high levels of cooperation.
During the drafting process, I thought it was important for us to insist that it should be written into Union legislation that each Member State should have the right to ban the importation of nuclear spent fuel for disposal. This principle is written into the IAEA Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste. The European Parliament endorsed the adoption of the Joint Convention at one point, and Euratom is a party to it. Thus there is general acceptance in the Union of the principle that a Member State need not take delivery against its will of spent fuel from other countries for disposal in its own soil.
Although the issue is a straightforward one in principle, in practice it is not. There has been resistance in the Commission to the idea that this right of a Member State should be written into Community legislation. The Commission may well be encumbered by the sort of thinking that proposes that the free movement of goods, written into the Treaty, should also apply to spent fuel for disposal. According to this way of thinking, nuclear spent fuel is just the same as any other good. Because, according to the Community treaties, goods must be allowed to move freely within the Union, the Member States should not be accorded the right in the Union’s primary legislation to ban the importation from other countries of nuclear spent fuel when it is storing its own nuclear spent waste in its own soil. Even in this sector, there would seem to be a craving for free trade.
The members of our committee supported the rapporteur on this. The right of Member States to ban the importation of nuclear spent fuel has now been written into the articles of the directive in Parliament’s report. As it has been written into the articles, the provision is legally binding. If it had merely been written into the preamble, it would not have had the same legal status: it would just be describing political will, without any legal force.
This principle and the entire report were adopted by the committee with such a degree of consensus that the report would not have needed to be opened at all for amendments in plenary. I nevertheless supported the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance in its request to have a plenary debate on amending the directive. In my opinion, they should make known their reasons why Member States should deal with the disposal of nuclear spent fuel themselves, without allowing radioactive waste or spent fuel to be exported outside the Union for reprocessing or disposal.
I would justify this request with reference to the Union’s expertise in nuclear technology, which is of a high standard, and its strict regulations on safety. I fear that there are lower standards and laxer legislation in possible external recipient countries. If nuclear power is to be used, one is taking huge radioactive risks, and those risks have to be controlled in those countries which produce nuclear energy. Problems that can possibly be solved together within the Union cannot be transferred to third countries outside it. For this reason, I support the many amendments tabled by the Greens, even if there was not enough general sympathy for them on the committee."@en1
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