The committee adopted the report by Esko SEPPÄNEN (GUE/NGL, FI) broadly approving the proposed directive on the supervision and control of shipments of radioactive waste and nuclear spent fuel, subject to a number of amendments under the consultation procedure:
- a new article was introduced stipulating that an acknowledgement of receipt of the application by the competent authorities of the Member State of destination and of transit, or a request for missing information where the application is not properly completed, shall be sent to the Member State of origin within 15 calendar days;
- the period of time allowed for granting consent or for refusal should be two months, to be counted from the date of acknowledgement of receipt. MEPs argued that the substantive analysis of the application for shipment authorisation can be conducted within that period, given that the proposal already provides for an extra month if necessary;
- it should be clarified that the same consent and refusal procedure shall be applied for both shipments of radioactive waste and shipments of spent fuel for disposal;
- a number of amendments sought to ensure that the Directive took account of the fact that, in practice, the issue of costs resulting from shipment failure can also be addressed in contractual arrangements between parties and/or in relevant applicable legislation;
- although MEPs accepted the idea of promoting voluntary agreements between Member States as a solution for small producers of radioactive waste, they wanted to include an express proviso that each Member State retains the right at all times to refuse entry on to its territory of both spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste for final processing or disposal, with the exception of reshipments.