The "El Cabril Model": ISIN visits the Spanish Radioactive Waste Repository

An ISIN delegation, led by Director Francesco Campanella, conducted an institutional visit to the El Cabril storage facility, located in the Sierra Albarrana (Córdoba). The visit provided a deeper understanding of the structural, technological, and management model—adopted in Spain—for the treatment and safety of very low, low, and medium-level radioactive waste from nuclear plants and various uses (such as the medical sector).
The El Cabril repository is managed by the public company Enresa.
During the visit, the ISIN delegation had access to some of the areas where the reception, treatment, conditioning, transfer, and final storage of waste destined for El Cabril takes place, as well as to the supervision and control areas, where they had the opportunity to interact with the dedicated technical and specialized personnel.
A significant aspect that emerged during the visit concerns the site's geographic location: El Cabril is located within the Sierra Albarrana, part of the Sierra Morena mountain range, in an area of ​​high natural value, adjacent to the Hornachuelos Natural Park.
The repository has not only not affected local biodiversity, but has actually protected it: the absence of urban and agricultural pressure has transformed the surrounding area into an ecological sanctuary.
This is a fundamental characteristic of the El Cabril repository: having been built to ensure the preservation of a pristine ecosystem.
El Cabril is a self-contained system that ensures an excellent technical and management model, which has proven capable of combining transparent communication, management efficiency, and nuclear safety.
The knowledge acquired by the ISIN delegation will certainly be a useful contribution to defining the operational strategy and technical assessments that are currently under discussion in our country.
In this regard, Director Campanella believes that "moments like those that have occurred in recent days, which led first to the exchange of information and experiences between the Inspectorate and its Spanish counterpart, the Consejo de Seguridad Nuclear (Nuclear Security Council), and then to the visit to the El Cabril repository, represent indispensable opportunities for professional enrichment. This will ultimately lead to our Authority ensuring the best possible interpretation of itself for the benefit of citizens, but also for the appropriate development of renewed technical awareness, based on objective data, concrete information, and real knowledge, not on prejudice and hearsay. Spain", continued the ISIN Director "can represent, in many aspects related to nuclear safety and radioactive waste management, a useful and stimulating model for discussion, precisely because it concerns a country that shares many similarities with our own. Engaging with other realities to try to effectively resolve the problem of building a national repository can certainly prove useful to promote a more systematic and harmonious approach, to which all stakeholders and administrations involved in various capacities can hopefully contribute. The Inspectorate will do its part in this regard, sparing no effort, hoping that in the meantime the work of strengthening it, currently being discussed by the relevant parliamentary committees as part of the ongoing debate on the enabling bill on sustainable nuclear power presented by the Government, will materialize".