Plutonium dispersal at home and abroad

   Spain is not a big player in the nuclear business. It has nine commercially operating reactors, a few small research reactors, some indigenous uranium and little else. Yet Spain has more plutonium contaminated land than possibly either France or the UK, which both have full-scale plutonium separation (reprocessing) factories on their territories-arising from an accident in 1966 involving nuclear weapons (see box on page 3) - and has also contributed to the French weapons plutonium stockpile. Moreover Spain is the first country where a nuclear plant operator (at Lemoniz, Basque country, in 1981) has been politically executed by terrorists, and local politicians have been kidnapped, by opponents of nuclear energy. This makes Spain a quite unique case.

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