Luxembourg, 18/04/2005 (Agence Europe) - The United Kingdom was right not to want to give the European Commission information on the disposal of radioactive waste linked to the dismantling of the Jason nuclear reactor at the Royal Naval College of Greenwich; the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice (13 judges) has ruled that the Euratom Treaty does not apply to military installations. With this ruling, the European Commission loses the trial it brought against the UK, claiming that it was in breach of article 37 of the Euratom Treaty. This article provides that each Member State is obliged to provide the Commission with general data on all plans to dispose of radioactive waste in any form, with a view to verifying whether the plans will lead to any radioactive contamination of the water table, the earth or the air space of another Member State.
The Jason reactor- used by the British Ministry of Defence between 1962 and 1996- was used for staff training and research into nuclear propulsion for the submarines of the Royal Navy. The United Kingdom, supported by France, argued that Jason was a military installation which did not come under the scope of the Euratom Treaty, which was set up to govern civil nuclear matters. The Commission contended that article 37 applied to the disposal of radioactive waster whether it came from civil or military installations, as the protection of the population against the dangers of radiation was an “indivisible objective”. The Court decided that the Euratom Treaty is not applicable to military uses of nuclear. It acknowledged that the Treaty confers considerable powers of intervention in the field of nuclear matters upon the European Commission. But “it is clear that the application of such provisions to installation, research programmes and other military activities could by their nature compromise the essential interests of the national defence of the Member States”.
The disposal of radioactive waste resulting from the dismantling of the Jason nuclear reactor was authorised by the Environment Agency for England and Wales.
Advocate General Leendert Geelhoed reached the conclusion that the UK should be found guilty because it had not provided the Commission with general data about the waste disposal plans and had not undertaken dialogue with the Commission on whether defence interests could be protected by less extreme means than total retention of information. In the view of Leendert Geelhoed, it was unacceptable for a Member State to refuse to provide information on plans to dispose of radioactive waste for the sole reason that this waste came from defence activities. In order to guarantee the essential interests of national defence but also in the name of the Member States' duty of fair cooperation with the Commission, Leendert Geelhoed proposed a dialogue system with the Commission on a case-by-case basis which, he said, avoided “blind application” of article 37.
In the view of specialists, the Advocate General has conducted interesting research on the history and the preparatory work on the Euratom Treaty, at the end of which he found France's and the UK's argument that nuclear energy used for defence purposes was excluded from the scope of the Euratom Treaty was “unconvincing”.
He felt that this had stemmed from the “all or nothing” approach in which one interest- public health or national defence- took precedence in all the other solutions.
In its ruling, the Court makes a brief reference to the conclusions of its Advocate General. The Member States envisaged the application of the Treaty to military nuclear, but these States “had different viewpoints on the issue and (…) decided to suspend the matter”, it said.