The Commission agrees with the Parliament's view that Euratom, which has not been significantly reformed since its entry into force, is limited in that it does not provide the EU with competences in several crucial areas: operational safety of nuclear power plants, management of radioactive waste storage or disposal facilities and decommissioning of facilities. These issues remain the responsibility of national authorities, and are influenced by a set of standards adopted at international level, for example by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The EP's report, presented by Lithuanian MEP Rapporteur Eugenijus Maldeikis of the Union of Europe of the Nations Group (UEN), acknowledges that Euratom remains an important and reasonably flexible framework for managing nuclear-energy policy in the EU. However, given the growing importance of nuclear energy as part of the EU's overall energy and climate change policies, Parliament regrets that "the growth in Parliament’s powers, and particularly their extension to include codecision procedure on the majority of European legislation, has not been taken into account in the Euratom Treaty".
In order to address this "unacceptable democratic deficit", the report calls for a future intergovernmental conference (ICG) in order to "repeal the outdated provisions of that Treaty, to maintain the regulatory regime of the nuclear industry at EU level, to revise the remaining provisions in the light of a modern and sustainable energy policy and to incorporate the relevant ones in a separate energy chapter".
