Blow for the Berkeley mining company. The new municipal corporation of Retortillo (Salamanca) has put a stop to the urban planning license that was granted to the company in 2020, and has decided to cancel it. The reason is that the entity has resumed the sanctioning file for “missing graves” within the framework of its project to build the largest open-pit uranium mine in Europe in this municipality.
“I have not presented myself for this in particular, I have nothing against the gentlemen of Berkeley, but I do against a mining exploitation in the Retortillo district,” explained the socialist mayor María del Carmen González Calderón, who replaced after the 28M elections for a PP mayor favorable to the mine.
The two decisions on Berkeley were made on Thursday, August 24, in an extraordinary session and unanimously by the municipal corporation, made up of four PSOE councilors and one from VOX. The Retortillo City Council thus cancels “the partial urban planning license granted to Berkeley Minera España in 2020 and declares its expiration”, while agreeing to “urgently resume and conclude the sanctioning file for very serious urban misconduct committed by the mining company in Retortillo”.
The activist against the mine and founder of the Stop Uranio platform, Jesús Cruz Fernández, has explained for his part that “these two files should already be resolved by the two previous corporations, but due to the relationship of interests between the mayors and councilors with the mining company, were left in oblivion so that they expire without penalty”.
The mayoress has insisted that what she wants “is for everything to return to legality” and has recalled that in the municipal corporation “there are people in favor of the mine, but they see that all this they have done is unfair.” “I do not belong to any environmental group, but I am very environmentalist. Having a mine here is a project for 10-12 years, when the ranchers have been there all their lives, the spa has been there for 100 years and it is 500 meters from where they wanted to exploit tar The thing about the mine”, he explained to EFE.
Project stopped by the Central Government
On July 24, the mining multinational accused the Ministry for the Ecological Transition of Spain of “violating” the administrative regulations in the processing of its uranium mine project in Salamanca, on which it maintains its appeal in court. Berkeley maintains that the way in which the Ministry has stopped its project in Salamanca “is not legal” and is “arbitrary”.
In his writing, he says that the studies carried out in the Retortillo area indicate that it can house 89.3 million pounds of uranium, which would make that place “one of the producers with the lowest cost per production in the world, capable of generating strong” benefits . economic. On May 16, Berkeley asked the central government to reconsider its decision to “veto” the project to build the largest open-pit uranium mine in Europe in Retortillo.
