The Diplomat
The Government has formally asked the United States to proceed with the removal of the soil that was contaminated as a result of the accident suffered in 1966 by two US planes in Palomares (Almería) and which caused four thermonuclear bombs to fall to the ground, according to diplomatic sources.
As reported yesterday by the newspaper El País, the government has decided to recover the unwritten agreement reached in 2015 with Barack Obama’s administration, which provides that the United States will be responsible for taking back to its territory the land that was contaminated as a result of the accident.
At the height of the Cold War, on 17 January 1966, two US Air Force aircraft, a KC-135 tanker and a B-52 strategic bomber, collided during a refuelling manoeuvre over the village of Palomares, in Cuevas de Almanzora (Almería).
As a result of the collision, seven of the eleven crew members of both aircraft died and four thermonuclear bombs carried by the B-52 were dislodged, leaving 40 hectares of land contaminated with americium and plutonium.
Almost half a century had to pass since then before, on 19 October 2015, the then Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, José Manuel García-Margallo, and the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, signed a declaration of intent in which both countries committed to a “major rehabilitation” of the area around Palomares and to undertake the transfer of contaminated soil to a “suitable site” in the United States.
At the joint press conference held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Margallo declared that the agreement would make it possible to “repair a mistake made 50 years ago”. “All’s well that ends well”, he said.
However, neither the timeframe for implementation nor which country would be responsible for financing the rehabilitation programme was detailed at the time, although both sides insisted on their willingness to do so “as soon as possible”.
In that statement, the United States expressed its willingness to “provide the necessary assistance” to achieve the goal of “further remediation” of the Palomares environment, and undertook to agree on “the disposal of the contaminated land at a suitable site” in the United States.
A little less than two years ago, the director of the Environmental Radiological Recovery Programme of the Centre for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research, Carlos Sancho, explained at a technical conference that the removal of the contamination and its transport to American soil depended on a political decision, although the technical aspects of the
Rehabilitation Plan “are under discussion” with the American authorities, who, moreover, “are in agreement”.
“We have discussed absolutely all the technical issues with the (US) Department of Energy in very exhaustive and lengthy meetings in Spain and the United States; we have discussed them very thoroughly and they are in agreement,” he said.
In this respect, he explained that CIEMAT has carried out a three-dimensional diagnosis of the situation, detailing the quantity and radiological location at Palomares and the Rehabilitation Plan.
