Hundreds of protesters from across Spain and Portugal gathered in Madrid to demand the end of the country's nuclear power stations.
The Iberian Antinuclear Movement, made up of 120 organisations from the two countries, demanded that the Spanish government progressively closes all its nuclear plants and commits the economy to renewable energy sources.
Demonstrators marched under the banner "Close Almaraz and all the others" and were joined by politicians from Podemos, Izquierda Unida and Equo as well as from a number of civic organisations representing public feeling.
The Equo leader, Juantxo López de Uralde, explained that "we are at a key moment because the Spanish nuclear plants are reaching the end of their useful lives and their futures must be decided."
Therefore, "we demand the progressive and orderly closure of all of them as and when their permits expire and that a plan for clean energy is put in place that is one hundred percent behind renewables and that rejects dirty energies such as nuclear."
"Insofar as nuclear power plants are older, they also are more dangerous, incidents increase and there is a greater risk of accidents, apart from the fact that they continue to accumulate waste without a way of dealing with it.”
Uralde said that nuclear "is an energy that is disappearing throughout the world, but in Spain is amortized and generates a very important net benefit to the electricity industry, hence the Government's support."
Also, the coordinator responsible for nuclear issues at Ecologistas En Acción, Francisco Castejón, emphasised that "we no longer know what to do with the waste" from nuclear power stations, while the danger increases, adding that the Portuguese Parliament voted unanimously in favour of the closure of the Almaraz nuclear power station in Cáceres, "which poses a threat to both countries."
The president of the Energy Commission, Ricardo Sixto, pointed out that "the sensitivity of Portugal to nuclear issues is very different from the Spanish one, because they chose not to depend on this energy but now it is being rejected by all political parties."
At the end of the march, a statement was read out in which the conveners called on Spain's parliament to approve a law that sets a deadline for plant closures to put an end to nuclear energy in Spain.
Portugal’s government was forced to withdraw its complaint about Almaraz and produced the required whitewash report to show that Almaraz, just 100 kilometres from the Spanish-Portuguese border, was quite safe after all and that Portugal had no problem at all with a new nuclear waste dump that is scheduled to handle spent fuel rods from all of Spain’s nuclear power stations.
See: 'Almaraz - minister prostitutes Portugal to Spanish interests'
