The Plenary of the Nuclear Safety Council has decided to knock down the Berkeley uranium concentrate factory project. In this way, the agency follows the Technical Opinion Proposal in which it reported unfavorably on the company’s request for authorization for the construction of a first-class radioactive facility for the nuclear fuel cycle in the municipality of Retortillo (Salamanca).
The Ministry of Ecological Transition must receive the opinion for its assessment, and although it is the one that has the last word on the project, everything points to its immediate stoppage, since the CSN report is binding.
The result of the vote was four votes in favor of the Technical Report Proposal drawn up by the Technical Department of Radiological Protection and one against, corresponding to counselor Javier Dies. Said director, in accordance with article 34 of the CSN Statute, has announced that he will cast a private vote in writing within 48 hours.
(CNMV), the company has announced that it will “firmly defend its position” and “immediately” consider the different legal options available to it after this setback.
Now, the technical opinion will be sent to the Ministry for Ecological Transition and is justified by the low reliability and high uncertainties of the safety analysis of the radioactive facility in geotechnical and hydrogeological aspects, on which the verification of adequate behavior depends. of various project parameters.
The technical deficiencies detected in the evaluation mainly refer to the final storage of very low activity radioactive waste, which forms part of the first category radioactive facility.
From a regulatory point of view, the information provided does not make it possible to determine the effective isolation capacity of the barriers that BME proposes to enclose the waste, and consequently neither the capacity to minimize the expected concentrations of radionuclides in the potential discharge zones.
The evaluations carried out on the documentation that accompanies the application for authorization of the installation have detected numerous deficiencies throughout the evaluation, which has required the maintenance of many technical meetings with the licensee, as well as numerous requests for additional information, in addition the preparation of a large number of reports and evaluation notes, and the complete review of the documentation by the licensee, in order to integrate and give coherence to the information generated about the project.
The evaluation of the construction authorization application reports has involved 11 technical areas from both CSN technical directorates, which have addressed issues within their competence, which include fire protection, systems engineering, mechanical and structural engineering, quality assurance, hydrogeology, seismology and meteorology, radiological protection of workers, radiological impact assessment, environmental radiological monitoring, low and medium activity waste, in addition to the area of cycle and dismantling facilities and the corresponding project headquarters.
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