The PP proposes to "unblock" the nuclear cemetery of Villar de Cañas in its response to the energy crisis

The PP has proposed that electricity companies be compensated with public money if they lower the bill for those who save the most energy. It is one of the main proposals of its economic plan to face the bill of the energy crisis of homes and companies.

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But this plan also contemplates “immediately unlocking” the construction of the Centralized Temporary Warehouse (ATC) for waste in Villar de Cañas (Cuenca). He justifies it in that the project “has more than 47,000 hours of technical study by the Nuclear Safety Council and there would be around 800 hours left to complete it”. In April the city hall of Cuenca, in which the popular govern, again supported the idea in plenary. What the PP does not say is that already in 2017 both the technicians of the Nuclear Safety Council and ENRESA itself had doubts on the suitability of the land to house this type of waste. And there are those doubts.

The Government of Emiliano García-Page has been opposing the installation of the nuclear cemetery in Castilla-La Mancha since he governs. In 2019, he asked the Minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, for the definitive closure of the project. He gave it up for 'failed' in 2020 and asked the PP to shake off "the bad dream" after what the minister declared that it would not be easy to recover it. But Alberto Núñez Feijóo's right wing insists and wants the nuclear waste from all of Spain (and that in France from Vandellòs I) to be stored in Cuenca.

The current president of the Castilian-Manchego Popular Party identified in 2018 the fact of installing the nuclear dump with putting Cuenca in the "vanguard". The PSOE accused Paco Núñez of "cynicism" because in 2010 his party had refused to install the ATC in his town, in Almansa (Albacete).

The proposal also includes extending the useful life of the Spanish nuclear power plants, whose closure is scheduled, according to the current calendar, between 2027 and 2035. The last to close would be the Trillo nuclear power plant, in Guadalajara, the newest in the country. About this issue experts have doubts about the profitability of keeping these plants open, apart from the problem of radioactive waste that remains unresolved in Spain. At the moment, the waste is being placed in individual temporary warehouses (ATI) at the plants.

Last July, the ATC project in Villar de Cañas was given air by a majority vote in the Congress of Deputies to the Asturias Forum proposal agreed with Vox. came out ahead thanks to the abstention of United We Can, which attributed its position to a "failure". A few days later, the formation, at a request from its representatives in Castilla-La Mancha, hurried to clarify its position. He did it with a Non-Law Proposal (PNL) in Congress in favor of the progressive closure of nuclear power plants and against the installation of a Centralized Temporary Warehouse (ATC) in Villar de Cañas (Cuenca).

The PP had also requested on its own in Congress the reactivation of the nuclear cemetery project in Cuenca and now insists on prolonging the useful life of nuclear power plants and reversing the closure of thermal power plants.

It has already sent its proposal to the Government of Spain. Of course, in their idea of ​​prolonging the life of nuclear plants, the time frame of the extension is not detailed and they indicate that a “review of the viability of the plants is necessary to extend their useful life beyond that closing schedule” in the necessary conditions of safety and technical feasibility according to the Nuclear Safety Council (CSN), "since it is a base energy, non-emitting and with limited costs".