Radioactive waste agency backs Swiss storage site referendum

The National Cooperative for the Disposal of Radioactive Waste (Nagra) would welcome a public vote on a proposed landfill storage site in Switzerland. + Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox Nagra CEO Matthias Braun hopes that legitimization by voters in a referendum would speed up the process. In an interview with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper on Tuesday, Braun said that a project of this size requires direct democratic legitimacy in addition to a technical review. The reason for the interview was the submission of the general license application for the deep geological repository for radioactive waste to the Swiss Federal Office of Energy on the same day. + Read about a Swiss invention to make nuclear power safer Braun said it was right that the public should be concerned with the issue of a deep geological repository and the technical data. Objections could also block the process. "This makes it all the more important that there is a national vote on ...