23.2.2023
EN
Official Journal of the European Union
L 58/1427 COMMISSION PILOT PROJECTS
CHAPTER PP 02 — EUROPEAN STRATEGIC INVESTMENTS (cont'd) PP 02 23
(cont'd)
PP 02 23 06
(cont'd) The shipments of radioactive waste towards a common disposal facility at Union level would be subject to the rules set out in Chapter 2 of Directive 2006/117/Euratom, which deals with ‘intra-community shipments’.
It must also be stressed that the Commission has set up an expert group on financial aspects of the nuclear back-end, including deep geological disposal facility, to support the Commission in assessing costing, financing and funding elements of such facilities.
Activities under that expert group work programme should be seen as complementary to some of the activities proposed under this project.
While disposing of radioactive waste in another Member State is allowed, the Directive 2011/70/Euratom, Article 4(1) sets out that each Member State shall have ultimate responsibility for management of the spent fuel and radioactive waste generated in it.
The possibility of disposing of radioactive waste in another Member State is regulated by Article 4(4) of Directive 2011/70/Euratom, which reads as follows: ‘Radioactive waste shall be disposed of in the Member State in which it was generated, unless at the time of shipment an agreement [...] has entered into force between the Member State concerned and another Member State [...] to use a disposal facility in one of them’.
Such agreement(s) should then be included in the national programme, as stipulated in Article 12(1)(k), according to which: ‘The national programmes [...] shall include: [...] (k) if any, the agreement(s) concluded’.
At the same time, Member States are encouraged to plan long-term and include deep geological nuclear waste repositories in their respective national plans.
As of today, no country worldwide has a deep geological repository for spent nuclear fuel in operation.
Currently, only Finland is constructing one and only Sweden and France have realistic plans for deep geological waste repositories to be available in the early 2030's.
The rest of the Member States have no such concepts yet thus their possible future projects would still take decades to be operational.
The French design plans however only take into account disposal capabilities for whatever French radioactive waste is in existence or planned as of today.
While nuclear energy plants are the most obvious, they are certainly not the only source of radioactive waste.
Industry, hospitals and medical devises, research centres and universities, they all produce radioactive waste.
All Member States, regardless of whether they have nuclear energy in their energy mix or not, produces and has to deal with some type of radioactive waste.
We believe that the enormous financial and engineering efforts required, in addition to the extremely long construction periods, make the duplicity of various deep geological repositories scattered across the Union seem extremely inefficient.
Therefore, we suggest launching, in cooperation with DG ENER, a pilot project (PP) and, if successful, a possible continuation through a preparatory action (PA).
Said process could take the form of a feasibility study on a deep geological nuclear waste repository of common European use carried out by, for example but not limited to, the ‘Implementing Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste Technology Platform’: knowledge created by the (IGD-TP) will be of high relevance.
The aim of such a study would be to enable policymakers to assess, data in hand, whether technically, financially and in terms of overall efficiency, pooling European resources together to deal with radioactive waste makes sense and determine if a review of current legislation to enable such a joint European approach to radioactive waste management would be required.