State Department Says Both Countries ‘Are Still Negotiating’

The United States has stymied the intentions of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel García-Margallo, who announced Friday that Washington has given “guarantees” that it would “quickly” remove the plutonium contaminated land in Palomares. The State Department affirmed that “No final decision has been reached regarding the cleanup of the site” and Margallo himself said yesterday that there are still technical questions that remain.

The Department of State confirmed in a press release that the two countries “continue to discuss remaining concerns” at the “highest level” and reminded us that the U.S. “has collaborated with Spanish authorities for over 40 years.”

In his first bilateral meeting with his American counterpart, Hillary Clinton, Margallo discussed the Palomares issue. After the meeting, held during the Munich Security Conference, the minister highlighted that Clinton declared she was “personally committed to resolving the issue during her term of office.”

The Spanish minister couldn’t give specific dates because he was still awaiting news “about technical responses on the part of the United States government” even though the “involved agencies still are negotiating amongst themselves.”

Sources close to the talks claimed that since the negotiations center on an issue that affects foreign nuclear waste, the matter is still being discussed in the National Security Council, an inter-departmental body assigned by the White House. In this case, the negotiations affect the departments of defense and energy, as well as the Department of State.

Margallo emphasized that Clinton had given him “the most a responsible politician can say in a circumstance like this, when there are other procedures that must be resolved.”

In 2004, Spain began diplomatic negotiations with the United States in order for the U.S. to remove the remaining contaminated land. The contamination was caused by an accident involving two U.S. Air Force planes in 1966. There is still one pound of plutonium that is contaminating 1,765,733 cubic ft. (50,000 cubic meters) of land. Spain doesn’t have a warehouse capable of storing this residual waste and demands that Washington remove it.

The problem is that the United States is afraid to set a precedent with respect to other countries where they have conducted nuclear tests. For years, the United States has eluded giving a clear response as to whether they will remove the contaminated land, even though they technically and economically collaborated in the extensive study on the remaining radioactive contamination that Spain concluded in 2008.