Yes, in my backyard

It took the new government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy just two weeks to decide on the location for the country's first nuclear waste dump, a highly sensitive issue on which previous governments had avoided reaching any conclusion over the last three decades.

The government has chosen Villar de Cañas - 135 kilometers southeast of Madrid - for the Centralized Temporary Store (ATC), saying it will bring 300 jobs to the economically depressed community of 436 people. The cost of building the plant has been estimated at 700 million euros.

"The ATC is an indispensable installation for a country with nuclear power stations," the Industry Ministry said in a statement on December 30. "Radioactive waste has been generated for decades and will continue to be for years because Spain is not in a position to do without nuclear power," it added.

Spanish nuclear power stations have accumulated an estimated 6,700 metric tons of spent fuel in cooling ponds and will run out of room to store it from 2013. But throughout a convoluted period of selection, Villar de Cañas was by no means the favorite in the running. It has no local connection with the nuclear industry, and is not linked to the railway network, two important factors for the Industry Ministry when it announced bidding to host the ATC in 2009. In its favor, the village is close to the Madrid-Valencia highway, and just 90 minutes from the capital. In the event, Villar de Cañas won by default.

The Catalan town of Ascó, the site of one of Spain's six nuclear power plants, had been one of the Industry Ministry's leading candidates, but the previous regional government there, along with the current administration, headed by CiU nationalist bloc leader Artur Mas, have made their opposition loud and clear.

Zarra, in Valencia topped the list of official candidates, and until the last minute looked the most likely location for the ATC. Aside from the fact that the mayor of this remote community faces several charges of corruption, there was strong, well-organized local opposition. Alberto Fabra, the head of Valencia's Popular Party-led regional government, is said to have appealed to Rajoy to have the site located elsewhere.

Which left just one option: Castilla-La Mancha.

There were two possibilities in this overwhelmingly rural central region: Yebra, in Guadalajara, and Villar de Cañas in Cuenca. Yebra, close to the Zorita nuclear plant, ticked more boxes.

Spanish voters are generally opposed to nuclear power - which provides about 21 percent of the country's electricity - and no new plants are planned. All but one of the eight existing reactors have been authorized to run until at least the 2020s.

The ruling Popular Party (PP) is officially pro-nuclear, but is also sensitive to the not-in-my-backyard approach to housing waste material. Dolores de Cospedal, the PP's secretary general and head of the regional government of Castilla-La Mancha, publicly rebuked the mayor of Yebra when he put forward the town to host the ATC.

"The PP in Castilla-La Mancha believes that there should be no nuclear waste storage plant, temporary or otherwise, in Castilla-Mancha, in none of its provinces, and in none of its municipalities," the then candidate for the regional premiership stated. After she was informed of the PP's pro-nuclear stance, she was forced to backtrack, saying the plant should not be located in Guadalajara, given that the province already had two nuclear power stations and two temporary waste storage sites. "I don't want it, nor do I not want it," was her final word on the matter.

This left Villar de Cañas the last man standing on the field. The reason was a political one. Guadalajara (where Yebra is located) was a key battleground in the May regional elections, eventually going over to the PP and helping to oust the Socialists from Castilla-La Mancha after three decades. In contrast, the province of Cuenca has for years produced the same result in local elections: two seats for the PP and one for the Socialists. Little was at stake in Cuenca for the PP. Furthermore, Villar de Cañas' PP mayor, José María Saiz, who had campaigned on bringing the ATC to his community, increased his vote in the municipal elections from 53 percent in 2007 to 67 percent, with the PP winning five places on the village's seven-seat council.

With the PP in government at regional and central levels, Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría was able to announce that Villar de Cañas' candidacy had been accepted - even though the government had yet to name a secretary of state for energy. Sáenz de Santamaría noted that the decision had been delayed for seven years, and that this situation has been costing Spain 60,000 euros a day for the last year - the amount charged by France for sending waste there (most of which will be returned when the ATC is built).

At any other time, the news would have been a bombshell, but it was largely overshadowed by the announcement of further austerity measures and surprise tax hikes. It being the holiday season also helped. Making the decision so soon after taking office also makes sense politically: by the time voters head to the polls, the ATC will be taking shape, with the resulting job creation, along with a planned research center, boosting the host area's economy.

But first there will be years of planning, studies and legal wrangling. And while other infrastructure projects are on hold, the ATC's funding is guaranteed. It will come from a fund controlled by the National Residue Agency (Enresa), which had reached 2.5 billion euros at the end of 2009, and had been collected from a toll on consumers' electricity bills imposed over the last two decades.

The day the government announced its decision, Villar de Cañas was overrun with journalists, who filled its three bars in the hope of gauging the mood of villagers. In one of them, La Mezquita, most drinkers were in favor of the ATC.

"I couldn't care less, because I'm already retired. I have lived through the worst years of Spain's history, but there are young people who will benefit from this," said Julio Villalón, a retired smallholder who at 77 still works 20 hectares of land to complement his 560 euros monthly pension. His six children have long since left the village, working in Valencia and Madrid. "In this area there is nothing but barley, wheat, and sunflowers. They built an industrial estate 20 kilometers up the road, but of the 20 units, only three are in use," he added.

The mayor of Villar de Cañas, José María Saiz, has no doubts about the benefits the ATC will bring, despite the concerns of environmentalists: "We've had German journalists here who can't get their head round it. But this is the salvation of this village. Look round you: 20 years ago this place was full; now it's Christmas and it's still empty. People talk about this place being a graveyard for nuclear waste, well let me tell you that the graveyard here has been filling up: more people die here than are born here. There are 200 empty properties. There is no work."

Silence fell on the bar when Santamaría appeared before the media following the Friday Cabinet meeting. A few people cheered when the mayor walked in the door, but soon turned their attention back to the television. When the deputy PM announced that Villar de Cañas had been chosen, the packed bar erupted into applause, with people hugging each other as though the village had won the national lottery, albeit without the champagne.

The celebrations brought to an end a process that had begun in 2004, when Congress passed a motion calling for the construction of a nuclear waste storage plant. The lower house demanded an end to the current system whereby each nuclear plant stores its own waste in water tanks, a method called further into question following last year's events in Fukushima.

Both of Spain's two main parties have fudged, dodged, and made political capital whenever they could out of the electorate's hazy understanding of nuclear energy. In February 1987, Enresa began investigating possible sites in Salamanca to store nuclear waste. In the ensuing public outcry, future Prime Minister José María Aznar, then an unknown member of the Alianza Popular opposition in the regional government, saw an opportunity to raise his political profile. The future convert to atomic energy led opposition to a waste plant in the region, helping him rise to the post of regional premier.

Since then, the PP has officially supported nuclear energy, but as the dispute between De Cospedal and the PP's leadership shows, electoral needs can override a coherent policy. José María Barreda, the former head of the regional government of Castilla-La Mancha, went head to head with the then Industry Minister Miguel Sebastián, when he put forward Zarra, in Guadalajara, as a candidate in 2009. "De Cospedal has more weight in the PP than I do in the Socialist Party. If I managed to get Sebastián to say that the plant would only be built in Zarra with my consent, she could have done the same." In Barreda's opinion, De Cospedal has put being "secretary general of the PP over premier of the regional government of Castilla-La Mancha. If she had kept up her opposition she would have had problems in Madrid, so she has backed down," he says.