The "Enrico Ferrmi" nuclear power plant in Trino, near Vercelli (Italy), was active from 1964 to 1990. Credit: Gregorio Ferraris/ iStockphoto/ Getty Images.
The Italian government wants to reintroduce nuclear power in the country, under a plan announced by the minister of environment, Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, who will meet with energy stakeholders on 21 September.
The Italian nuclear programme started in the 1960s and came to a sudden halt at the end of the 1980s, after the explosion of the Chernobyl reactor in the Soviet Union. In 1987, Italians voted overwhelmingly in a referendum against further nuclear development. Moves to restart the programme were halted by another referendum in 2011.
Pichetto Fratin was unclear about the objectives and funding of the new ‘National Platform for Sustainable Nuclear’, other than stating that it will “coordinate all the national actors that work on nuclear energy”, and that it will be co-led by his ministry, the ENEA (the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development) and RSE (Research on the Energy System), a research agency controlled by the Ministry of Finance. Matteo Salvini, the minister for infrastructure and transport, said he hopes the first nuclear energy production in Italy could happen within a decade.
But, experts say the time needed to re-establish a nuclear programme would be longer, and some of them question whether it is feasible, or desirable.
“Building a [state-of-the-art] plant requires seven to ten years”, says Alessandro Dodaro, director of the nuclear department of ENEA. “But in a country without presence and acceptance of nuclear power, you need at least five years more to inform people and make them understand the advantages.”.
Finding sites to build new reactors will be challenging. When a list of potential locations for a unified repository of nuclear waste was revealed in 2021, none of the 67 municipalities involved accepted to host it. Italy’s waste from nuclear plants and medical applications is currently stored at various sites.
The new platform would also need to decide whether to adopt for existing technology (the so-called 3rd generation nuclear reactors), or bet on future ones (4th generation), Dodaro points out.
The Turin-based company Newcleo, for example, is developing a new concept of reactor that uses lead instead of water, as neutron moderator and for plant refrigeration. Fourth-generation reactors would rely on the most common isotope of uranium (U238) and recycle most of their waste.
Dodaro says that ENEA cooperates with the company and that a first working prototype of Newcleo’s plant is expected not earlier than in 12 years from now. He believes Italy should go for that. “A 15-year framework would allow us to jump directly to lead reactors,” he says.
Italy still has nuclear knowledge, according to Ezio Previtali, director of the Gran Sasso National Laboratories, who has been invited to the September meeting to represent the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). “Many companies have continued to work for foreign clients after Italy left its programme, and technical universities have continued to educate nuclear engineers,” he says.
Previtali and Dodaro agree that nuclear energy should be produced in Italy to meet the proportion of demand that cannot depend on the fluctuations of renewable sources.
But others question the strategy altogether. “Time is a key factor in the energy transition,” says Nicola Armaroli, an energy analyst at the Italian National Research Council (CNR). “We don’t have time to wait for nuclear power in 20 years from now. By that time, we must complete the decarbonization of the electricity sector, and renewable energy is less expensive, more socially acceptable, and more feasible”.
