The Spanish government has submitted an official request to remove contaminated soil from the Almeria town of Palomares, which was left as a legacy of the largest nuclear accident of the Cold War.
The political commitment to move the contaminated soil to the Nevada desert was signed in October 2015 between Madrid and Washington. The accident occurred in January 1966, when a B-52 bomber and a US Army KC-135 tanker plane collided and dropped four thermonuclear bombs. Two bombs were recovered intact, but the other two dispersed their plutonium payload and contaminated the area without detonating. The US carried out an operation to clean up the area, and the Franco dictatorship considered the matter solved with the famous Manuel Fraga’s bath on the beach and the certificates and compensations distributed to the neighbours of Palomares and Villaricos.
The decontamination plan drawn up in 2010 involved compacting and filtering the affected soil to leave it at about 6,000 cubic meters, for which a destination would have to be found since there is no storage facility in Spain. In 2015, a political agreement was reached whereby Spain would be in charge of the cleanup and the US would keep the radioactive soil, but that memorandum was never developed, and the contamination lingers in Palomares.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has submitted the official request for the US to proceed with the removal of the land. Although there is still no response from Washington, the initial reception has been positive. The clock is ticking, as there are only a few months left until the end of the legislature, but the sources consulted are optimistic about the possibility of reaching an agreement in time, since bilateral relations “are at their best moment in recent years.” The negotiations to expand the Navy destroyers stationed at the Rota naval base (Cadiz) are not related to the cleaning of Palomares, and Spain does not see it as a give-and-take.