The government has taken advantage of decree of measures to alleviate “the economic and social consequences of the war in Ukraine” to regularize the state of soil contaminated by radiation in Spain. The inclusion of this final provision in the decree has been advanced by The country.
The text, which was published this Wednesday in the Official State Gazette, modifies the Francoist law of 1964 on nuclear energy and defines as contaminated land with a concentration of radiation that poses “an unacceptable risk to human health or the environment” . And he adds that land with restricted use will be those with levels that allow some uses. In both cases, it will be the Ministry of Ecological Transition that declares them.
The legal amendment indicates that the owners of potentially contaminated land or the owners of activities that may contaminate the land with radiation must inform the Government about the condition of the land where these activities have been carried out or are planned to be carried out.
With this rule, the Ministry of Ecological Transition will be able to create an official list of soils or land that are contaminated or where activities are limited by the presence of radiation. Until now, the Nuclear Security Council had detected six zones, but, it argued, they could not be declared as such because there was no legal basis to do so.
In that list appeared Palomares, (Almería), Mendaña marshes (Huelva), the Tinto River estuary (Huelva), the Hondón (Murcia Region), the Flix reservoir (Tarragona) and the Jarama riverbank (Madrid) .
The legal limbo of these radioactive soils has meant, for example, that the cleanup of the land in Palomares, where a US plane carrying four atomic bombs crashed, has remained unaddressed for more than half a century.
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