A file photo dated 12 December 2004 showing the nuclear power plant in Krsko, Slovenia. Photo: EPA/STRINGER

Croatia’s parliament on Monday passed a law establishing a regulatory framework for building a disposal facility for radioactive waste from the Krsko Nuclear Power Plant in Slovenia, as well as waste generated by domestic hospitals and industry.

The preferred location for the facility is Cerkezovac, on Trgovska Gora – only three kilometres away from the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, raising concern there for the Una National Park, which is nearby.

In 1970, Croatia and Slovenia agreed to build a nuclear power plant near Krsko, Slovenia. Today, Croatia receives some 16 per cent of its electricity consumption from the plant and is obliged to store part of the nuclear waste it produces.

The new Act on the Construction of a Centre for the Disposal of Radioactive Waste provides for planning decisions on the location of the centre and defines the conditions for implementing the project.

The plans include the construction of a new facility for storing radioactive waste from the Krsko Nuclear Power Plant, as well as the reconstruction of existing buildings, former Yugoslav Army warehouses, to hold radioactive waste generated within Croatia.

The law also establishes the terms for conducting an environmental impact assessment at the Cerkezovac location and allows for the centre’s construction if the project is deemed environmentally acceptable.

Under the agreement with Slovenia, Croatia handles the disposal of half of the low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste generated by the Krsko Plant.

Vjeran Pirsic, from the green association Eko Kvarner, said Croatia needs a site for the disposal of radioactive waste, as the issue must be resolved and cannot be addressed outside the country.

However, “There was insufficient preparation in communication with citizens,” Pirsic said, adding that local real estate will inevitably lose value. “I don’t mean only houses, but also public spaces, such as forests, parks, gardens and arable land,” he noted, adding that affected residents should be compensated.

Pirsic stressed the importance of ensuring safety, while outlining reasons for concern.

“There is technology capable of addressing this issue in an acceptable way, with minimal or no impact on the environment and with minimized risk,” he said, also expressing his doubts. “What we have learned in life is that … investors tend to opt for cheaper environmental protection solutions in order to increase profits,” he told BIRN. 

Activists in the Bosnian town of Novi Grad, located just over four kilometres from the planned location, have been warning for a decade that the location is not acceptable for anyone living accros the Una river, which forms the natural border between Croatia and Bosnia here.

“This is a message to all of us living in Bosnia and Herzegovina that the only right we have in this case is to move away if we don’t like what Croatia is doing,” Mario Crnkovic, from the citizen’s association Green Team, told BIRN.

“Bosnia sent two protest notes to Croatia, which they did not reply to, and I think that it’s time for Bosnia to act internationally,” Crnkovic added.

The mayor of Novi Grad, Miroslav Drljaca, said Croatia’s new law on the construction of a radioactive waste disposal centre is yet another blow to the Trgovska Gora issue, adding that the problem will have to be resolved at the international level.

Drljaca said Bosnia has already explained why the selected site is dangerous for municipalities in the Una River basin, while Croatia has not included Bosnia in its plans, or shared research results.

“All this time, they have not included us either in their plans or in the research results. We do not know what their next step is,” SRNA news agency reported him as saying.

He added that further explanations are pointless, as Croatia knows how the location was selected and what was bypassed to realise the plans.

“It is high time that we focus on resolving the problem at the international level, before the Espoo Convention [on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context] Secretariat or through court proceedings. This is an issue that will have to be addressed at the international level,” he said.