PURPOSE : to supervise
and control shipments of radioactive waste and nuclear spent waste.
PROPOSED ACT :
Council Directive.
CONTEXT : the revision process of Directive 92/3/Euratom of 3 February
1992 on the supervision and control of shipments of radioactive waste between
Member States and into and out of the Community was initiated in 2001 in the context of the fifth phase of the SLIM initiative (Simpler Legislation for Internal
Market; SLIM V), with a view to making Directive 92/3 Euratom more
user-friendly and transparent.
CONTENT : this
proposal aims to amend Council Directive 92/3/Euratom in order to clarify and
add concepts and definitions, to address situations that had been omitted in
the past, to simplify the existing procedure for the shipment of radioactive
waste between Member States and to guarantee consistency with other Community
and international provisions, and in particular with the joint Convention for
the safe management of spent fuel and radioactive waste, to which the
Community acceded on 2 January 2006.
Modifications to
the provisions of Directive 92/3 are justified by four different reasons:
- Consistency
with latest Euratom Directives : Directive 96/29/Euratom of 13 May 1996
laying down basic safety standards for the protection of the health of
workers and the general public against the dangers arising from ionising
radiation, and Council Directive 2003/122/Euratom of 22 December 2003 on
the control of high-activity sealed radioactive sources and orphan
sources, in particular the wording of the provisions on reshipment of
radioactive sealed sources;
- Consistency
with international Conventions , in particular in view of the ongoing
accession of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) to the IAEA
Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent fuel Management and on the
Safety of Radioactive Waste Management;
- Clarifying
the procedure in practice and improving the Directive structure;
- Extension of
the scope to spent fuel. Under Directive 92/3, spent fuel for which no
use is foreseen is considered as “radioactive waste” and shipments of
such materials are subject to the uniform control procedure laid down in
the Directive. Shipments of spent fuel for reprocessing are on the
contrary not subject to such a procedure. This leads to the
inconsistency that the same material is or is not subject to this
procedure depending on its intended use.