The meeting was due to take place on Thursday morning at 11.30am local time, 10.30am in Portugal.
The meeting was confirmed after officials in Lisbon said on Wednesday that they had received guarantees that the final decision on the planned construction of a nuclear waste storage facility in Almaraz hadnot been taken.
The Portuguese government said last week it planned to file a formal complaint with the European Commission about the nuclear waste plant, which the Spanish government has authorised to be built in Almaraz, 100 kilometres from the central Portuguese border.
The Spanish authorities reportedly did not consult with Portuguese authorities before green-lighting the project.
According to the Portuguese authorities, the plant’s environmental impact studies did not consider cross-border impacts.
A meeting was due to be held on Thursday between the Environment ministers of both countries, but the Portuguese Minister, João Matos Fernandes, said he would not attend the meeting if it became clear that Spain had already made a decision to move ahead with the expansion of the plant.
The Portuguese Foreign Minister said last Friday that the two countries were working hard to “create conditions for that meeting to be useful, which is to say, for it to be possible to make decisions.”
Asked about the Spanish government’s position on the Almaraz plant, the minister said: “I believe we can solve it.”
The Almaraz nuclear plant has regularly faced opposition from environmental groups either side of the border and also from the current leftist government.
Minister Fernandes, last year, requested an urgent meeting with Spanish officials on plans to build the nuclear waste deposit in Almaraz, but his calls were apparently repeatedly ignored by Madrid.
Earlier this month, Portuguese and Spanish environmental groups announced plans to stage a protest outside the Spanish Consulate in Lisbon to call for the closure of the Almaraz nuclear plant. The protest was also planned for Thursday and was called in a bid to force Madrid into dialogue with interest groups over the closure of the controversial plant.
Last Spring, Portuguese environment protection agency Quercus said it had united with Spanish organisations in their calls to demand that the Almaraz nuclear power plant be closed down as it represents “a potential danger to the border area”.
Quercus stressed that the Spanish plant is located close to the Tagus river, around 100 kilometres from the border, and has had its activity prolonged for another ten years even though “not all of the risk factors have been considered nor tests carried out”.
It added that “there is a worrying risk with Spanish power plants in as much as not all risk factors have been considered nor tests carried out” and “nor do they contemplate the risk of external attacks, such as bombings or plane crashes.”
Other risks like natural disasters, from earthquakes to flooding, are also not involved in the plants’ risk assessments, the Portuguese association warns, nor are external rescue management systems.
Therefore, Quercus stressed, it is important to keep warning about the risks that this particular type of energy entails, “so that Portugal and the world are free from nuclear dangers.”
History, it elaborated, “has shown that it is very difficult to foresee how events like those at Chernobyl would play out.”
The problems, the environmentalists alerted, are at the beginning of the cycle, in uranium exploration, which causes environmental and serious health problems worldwide, and in Portugal, several decades after the end of exploration “the problems have not been fully diagnosed and, therefore, are still far from being solved.”
“There are more than sixty abandoned mines that continue to pollute the water and soil and affect neighbouring populations,” Quercus argues, while highlighting the lack of a stable and safe destination for nuclear waste.