Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-06-22-Speech-3-252-000"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20110622.19.3-252-000"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:translated text |
".
Madam President, honourable Members, today we are discussing a Commission proposal on a subject that concerns Europe and that is on Parliament’s agenda for the second time. The Commission’s first proposal was not adopted in 2003 and 2004. We believe that it is sensible and advisable at a European level to apply the highest safety standards to the use of nuclear energy, regardless of the purpose for which it is being used, and to the management of nuclear waste.
Thirdly, we specifically support the rapporteur’s views on the importance of adequate financing for national waste management programmes. For this reason, the Commission proposal includes important requirements concerning financing which aim to ensure that we do not impose an excessive burden on future generations. Therefore, we want to guarantee that appropriate funding is made available at the right time and in accordance with the ‘polluter pays’ principle, that the national programmes include detailed and reliable cost forecasts and that the employees and the population as a whole are given information about all the issues relating to waste management. It is important that the financing is also transparent.
We also support the proposals that the financing of waste management must be guaranteed over suitably long periods. We will submit these proposals to the Council on your behalf.
My last point concerns exports. The basic principle of our proposal is that every Member State, regardless of how many, if any, nuclear power stations it has and what volume of waste it usually has to process, because every Member State has nuclear waste from medical devices and from industrial research, even if it has no power stations, must take responsibility for its own tasks and also enter into bilateral agreements and develop solutions with other Member States. In principle, exports to third countries are not in the interests of Europe.
In my home country of Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, large amounts of hazardous waste were exported to the former German Democratic Republic and to Eastern Europe and stored there in return for payment in facilities which did not even come close to meeting the standards of the time and which did not provide the best possible protection for the environment and for the population. This is also a concern in this case. For this reason, we in the Commission are prepared to adopt every possible restrictive solution, including export bans and export restrictions. We want to call on Parliament not to support the opening up of this area, but to support a restrictive solution. This will make it easier for us to ensure that the Council does not water down the export restrictions at the end of the procedure.
I would like to thank you very much for your constructive support today. I am sure that in a few years we will be discussing this subject again in Parliament with the aim of extending and improving this first directive.
I would like to thank Mrs Jordan Cizelj for her comprehensive report and for her work over the last few weeks. I would also like to thank the shadow rapporteurs from the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy and from the other committees. My officials tell me that you have produced a highly factual and competent report. We are pleased that it supports the essential aspects of the Commission proposal, which is intended to be an important building block in the development of a comprehensive European legal and regulatory safety system at the highest possible level.
I am pleased that you fundamentally agree with the concept of the European legal framework and that you support our proposals on the responsibility for the national programmes, on clear working, timing and financial requirements, on information and on the full involvement of the general public at an early stage in every national implementation process.
We want to work jointly to ensure that we have detailed and reliable proof of the waste management routes and their safety, particularly as the storage periods will be very long.
We believe that many of the proposals that you have drawn up are well-informed. They support and strengthen the Commission’s approach.
I would like to make some additional remarks about four specific areas.
Firstly, the basic principle is that we do not want to regulate every detail of the fundamental concept of subsidiarity. The starting position of all the Member States is different. We want to put in place a European legal framework. The essential points that are important for safety and for standards are included in the draft document. For example, we have left room for manoeuvre with regard to the type of public participation, the education and training of employees and managers and the details of the financial models – not the quality of the financing – and we are deliberately leaving open the regulation of the final storage facilities built and/or operated jointly by several Member States. Where necessary, we can make recommendations in this area, if we need to be more specific later in the process.
However, I am sure that this proposal will not be the last to be submitted over the next 20 years. I expect that we will need to add to or amend the contents during the implementation process over the next two to five years. This is why the Commission is explicitly offering all of you the opportunity to revise the directive at the right time, so that we can learn from our experiences and improve the directive even further.
Secondly, if we look at the issue of the reversibility of the stored fuel elements and waste, the principle is that every storage facility must be suitable and safe for permanent final storage, from a geological and a technical perspective and as far as its construction is concerned. However, we are aware that there will be developments in the fields of research and science. At the moment, there are growing expectations that in the foreseeable future, over the next few decades, developments during the next or next-but-one generation of science will enable us to recycle or store waste more effectively than we can today. Therefore, we believe the option of reversibility and, in the meantime, of constant access and security to be equally important and we want to be able to incorporate this into national legislation and perhaps to make it clearer in the preamble."@en1
|
| lpv:videoURI |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples