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Country profile: Spain

Summary figures for 2010

Country
Number of nuclear power plants connected to the grid
Nuclear electricity generation
(net TWh) 2010
Nuclear percentage of total electricity supply
Spain
8
59.2
 *
20.1
  
OECD Europe
144
868.5
24.7
  
OECD Total
342
2 183.7
21.8
  

* Provisional data

Country report

The basic aims of the Spanish energy policy are the security of supply, the enhancing of the contribution of the energy to improve the Spanish economy’s competitiveness and the fulfilment of the environmental targets.

In relation with nuclear energy, the present policy of the Government is to reduce, in an orderly and progressive way, its participation in the energy supply, shutting down nuclear power plants at the end of their lifetime, giving priority to the guarantee of security and, with the maximum social consensus, advancing in the use of renewable sources and in the development of all the technological possibilities that can contribute to optimise the saving and the power efficiency.

In 2008, the nuclear share on the overall electricity production was 18.3%, with an increase of 7% in the net nuclear energy generated with respect to the previous year, as a consequence of some long outages in some plants in 2007. In 2008, the average Load Factor of the Spanish nuclear park was 86.6%.

In order to initiate the dismantling of the José Cabrera NPP, which was definitively shut down in April 2006, the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade, based on the previous favourable report of the Nuclear Safety Council, granted in March 2008 an start-up authorisation of a Temporary Storage Facility at the plant site, for dry storage in metal-concrete type casks of the spent fuel of this NPP.

This Temporary Storage Facility is an outdoor installation linked to the plant by an access road for the transfer of the loaded storage modules by means of a special vehicle for this task. The installation consists basically of a reinforced concrete slab on which will be placed vertically the 12 modules required to house the 377 fuel elements (around 100 tU) from the plant.

The Juzbado nuclear fuel fabrication facility manufactured 925 fuel assemblies containing 309 tU.

With regard to management of spent fuel and high-level waste, a priority objective established in the Sixth General Radioactive Waste Management Plan (GRWP) is the availability of a Centralised Temporary Storage (ATC). With this objective, in April 2006, the Commission for Industry, Tourism and Commerce of the Spanish Congress approved a proposal advising the Government to start a public participation procedure to select a site for ATC. The works of this Commission have continued in 2008.

In relation to low and intermediate level waste, the El Cabril facility has managed the low and intermediate level waste generated at radioactive and nuclear facilities, and the inventory of radioactive wastes as of 31 December 2008 reached 25 200 m3 disposed of in concrete containers.

With reference to very low-level waste, since 2008, the El Cabril facility has a specific very low-level waste disposal area, consisting of a cell with a disposal capacity of some 30 000 m3. The cell is a pit excavated in the ground over which a series of drain age or water-proofing layers have been arranged to prevent the possible dispersion of leakages in the medium. The aim in the future, when this cell is full, is to construct a further three until the authorised capacity of 130 000 m3 is completed.

In this way, it will be possible to definitively dispose of the contaminated materials arising especially from the dismantling of facilities, the specific activity of which is hundreds of times lower than that of the low and intermediate-level wastes currently disposed of in the other area of the El Cabril facility.

During 2008, an amendment of Regulation on Nuclear and Radioactive Installations was issued (Royal Decree 35/2008). The object of this revision is to take advantage of the experience gained and to incorporate into the Spanish legal corpus the new international Agreements that Spain has committed to comply with, settled since the former regulations were approved in 1999. This revision includes, among other, the following reforms:

Source: Nuclear Energy Data 2009

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Last reviewed: 7 October 2011