Brussels (Platts)--14Oct2009/806 am EDT/1206 GMT

The European Commission services are looking at nuclear waste issues in readiness to propose EU rules if the incoming EU energy commissioner wants them, a senior EC official said Wednesday.

"Nuclear waste storage is more a political than technical issue," the EC's director for nuclear energy Peter Faross told an industry meeting in Brussels. "I can't announce any details until we have a new [energy] commissioner but the services would be ready to make appropriate proposals on waste management."

The mandate for the present EU commissioners expires on October 31, but the uncertainty over when and if the Lisbon treaty introducing new EU governance rules will be fully ratified means it is not yet clear when the new EU commissioners will be in place.

Each EU commissioner sets his priorities for his five-year mandate, but EC President Jose Manuel Barroso, who was confirmed for a second term last month, has already said one of the new commission's priorities will be to work on decarbonizing the EU's power sector by 2050.

The EC proposed draft EU nuclear safety and waste directives in 2003, but failed to get enough EU governments to approve them. Last year it revised the safety proposal and succeeded in getting a milder version adopted by the EU in June this year.

A power industry source told Platts that the EC was expected to propose a new draft EU nuclear waste directive in early 2010.

DECOMMISSIONING FUNDS AN OPEN ISSUE

How to manage nuclear decommissioning funds was one of the most controversial issues in the EC's original proposals on waste, leading it to produce separate formal recommendations on this in 2006.

"The EC is regularly monitoring to see if the recommendations are being respected," said Faross. "If the EC's conclusions out of the monitoring are that everything is functioning in the EU, then it would be difficult to go for regulation [on this]."

--Siobhan Hall, siobhan_hall@platts.com