As Brazil brings its second nuclear reactor online, questions persist about the disposal of radioactive waste.

And for good reason: Though the new plant, Angra II, will boost Brazil’s output of nuclear waste by two-thirds, the government has yet to designate a permanent disposal site.

Angra II, a 1,250-megawatt plant, sits beside what until now has been the country’s sole nuclear plant—the 600-megawatt Angra I. The new facility is slated to go on line by the end of this month or in early July.

With Angra II’s startup drawing near, many here have renewed calls for a permanent waste site. In May, Congressman Fernando Gabeira submitted a revised version of a 1991 bill requiring the government to choose a site and build a disposal facility by a date that would be subject to negotiation.

The proposal, which sets no deadline for picking a site, won unanimous approval in the Chamber of Deputies, Brazil’s lower house, on May 30. It is expected to clear the Senate and be signed by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso by the end of this month.

For Gabeira, timing was everything: “I was able to get the government to support the proposal because it wanted to show concern for the problem of permanent nuclear waste storage now that Angra II is about to go online.”

Under the bill, plans for permanent nuclear waste sites must be subject to environmental impact statements. The National Nuclear Energy Commission (CNEN), the government’s nuclear energy agency, would be responsible for managing the sites and for overseeing the transport of waste to them. The proposal also would require that royalties be paid to municipalities hosting the sites.

All of Angra I’s high-level waste (spent nuclear fuel containing plutonium) has been placed in a water-filled pit inside the plant. Officials say the facility can accommodate waste for the entire lifetime of the plant.

Meanwhile, all of Angra I’s low-to-medium level waste (radiation-exposed rubber gloves, tools and filters, for example) is being stored in drums on the plant grounds. The CNEN plans to store Angra II’s low-to-medium level waste in the same place.

Alfredo Tranjan, technical director of the nuclear commission, says that, at least for now, both low and high-level waste should be kept at the Angra complex, which is 90 miles (144 km) south of Rio de Janeiro.

“A permanent, low-to-medium level waste depository should be built at the Angra site to avoid transport risk [and] cost, and high-level waste should simply remain inside the Angra I and II nuclear plants because the government hasn’t decided whether to recycle it,” he says.

Ruy de Goes, coordinator of the anti-nuclear campaign for Greenpeace in Brazil, calls such a strategy irresponsible. “The Angra site is an unsafe place to store low-to-medium level or high-level waste, even temporarily, [because it is] in a humid area of frequent mudslides, occasional earthquakes and where the water table is close to the surface,” he says.

Gabeira agrees. He also questions the reason nuclear energy authorities offer for not moving more quickly to identify a waste site.

“It’s easy for CNEN to delay dealing with the issue of a permanent disposal site for high-level Angra I and Angra II waste with the excuse that it hasn’t decided whether to recycle it or not,” Gabeira says. “The fact is that some of that high-level waste is un-recyclable and will have to be permanently disposed of sooner or later.”

Such criticism prompted Rio de Janeiro state to ask the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to investigate the low-level waste depository at Angra I before Angra II goes on line. In preliminary findings issued last month, IAEA technicians pronounced Angra I’s low-to-medium-level waste depository “adequate for temporary storage for a long period of time,” and said the plant’s high-level waste-storage process was “simple, direct, and benefited from recent modifications.”

Government officials say the findings show that criticism of Angra’s waste-disposal is overstated. But Gabeira dismisses the IAEA visit as “a diplomatic mission, not a technical one.”

Amid this debate, Rio de Janeiro state’s branch of the Brazilian attorney general’s office has begun investigating complaints that Angra I, unlike Angra II, has never received an environmental license. Ibama, Brazil’s environmental enforcement agency, is now identifying steps Angra I must take to obtain such a license—including steps concerning the storage of nuclear waste.

A lawyer with the attorney general’s office says that if Eletronuclear, the government agency that runs Angra I, fails to comply, her office will seek an injunction to close the plant.