Setbacks follow one another for the government in the endless politico-judicial soap opera Stocamine. In a decision handed down on Thursday January 12, the administrative court of Strasbourg recorded the cessation of work to contain the hazardous waste buried on the Stocamine storage site, in Wittelsheim, in the Haut-Rhin. The file opposes for twenty years the State, favorable to the final storage, and the local authorities and environmental associations, which ask for the withdrawal of the most toxic products.
This judgment on the merits confirms the decision rendered in May in summary proceedings by the same body: “Work is suspended. » The huge preparatory site for the closure of the site, approved by the government in January 2021, after years of procrastination, is at a standstill.
Nicknamed “the toxic trash can of Alsace”, Stocamine is 42,000 tonnes of highly toxic waste (arsenic, asbestos, chromium, incineration residue, etc.) buried 550 meters underground, in galleries dug alongside an old potash mine. They threaten, in the long term, the water table of Alsace, the largest in Europe, which supplies drinking water to some seven million inhabitants on both sides of the Rhine. The fire, in 2002, of block 15, led to the cessation of new waste on the site and the start of the soap opera.
“Concrete on evidence”
At the request of the government, the prefect of Haut-Rhin had issued a new decree on January 28, 2022 (after that of 2017 canceled in October 2021 by the Nancy Court of Appeal) authorizing, as a precaution, the carrying out of necessary work containment of the waste, including the construction of six watertight barriers around the galleries and the backfilling of the famous block 15. At the same time, it gave notice to the site operator, Mines de potasse d’Alsace (MDPA), whose State shareholder, to submit a new authorization application file for the unlimited storage of waste. This decree had been attacked by the European Community of Alsace (CEA, grouping of the departments of Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin) and the Nature environment association.
In its judgment, the administrative court annuls the decree, considering that “the prefect could not, as a precaution, authorize containment work (…) without waiting for the completion of the examination of the storage authorization request for an unlimited period”considering that these works present a “definitiveness”. The administrative judge adds that “the prefect does not justify a reason of general interest to carry out such operations urgently”. He concludes that “the need to carry out the irreversible backfilling of block 15 is not justified”.
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