A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #46 - Nuclear power has never ended - Totò Caggese (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

For months, the government has been working on a mandate to reopen the 
nuclear issue in Italy. Public debate has been buzzing about 
"sustainable nuclear," small modular reactors, energy security, and 
ecological transition. Yet perhaps the first thing to say is something 
else. --- Nuclear power, in Italy, has never ended.
Italian power plants stopped producing electricity after the 1987 
referendum[1], held in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. In 2011, 
after the Fukushima disaster, a second referendum confirmed that choice. 
Italy is one of the few European countries where the rejection of 
nuclear power has been expressed twice through a direct popular vote.

But closing the plants didn't mean shutting down nuclear power. Rather, 
it meant entering a long phase of managing its legacy.

For nearly forty years, Italy has continued to live with spent fuel from 
old power plants, thousands of cubic meters of radioactive waste 
scattered across the country in temporary storage facilities, plants yet 
to be dismantled, and ongoing surveillance, maintenance, and management 
costs that continue to fall on the community.

It is a less visible nuclear power, almost removed from public 
discourse, but profoundly present in the materiality of the territory.

According to the National Inventory of Radioactive Waste, Italy 
currently holds over 33,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste spread 
across temporary storage sites from Piedmont to Basilicata. This will be 
joined by waste from the decommissioning of old power plants-Caorso, 
Trino, Latina, and Garigliano-and waste generated daily by medical, 
industrial, and research activities.

Because nuclear energy isn't just about large nuclear power plants. It 
also exists in hospitals and laboratories.

nuclear medicine professionals, in research centers, in industrial 
activities that use radioactive materials, in specialized transport and 
in storage sites scattered throughout the country.

And here lies perhaps the first major denial of the contemporary debate. 
Nuclear power doesn't just produce energy. It also creates a long 
material legacy of waste, infrastructure, maintenance, surveillance, and 
risk management. A very long temporality that continues well beyond the 
economic life of the plants and beyond the very political era that 
generated them.

In this sense, nuclear power is a unique technology: it outlives itself. 
Even when it stops producing electricity, it continues to generate 
costs, technical equipment, territorial conflicts, and collective 
responsibilities that span entire generations.

And it is precisely this material continuity that makes the return of 
nuclear power to the Italian political debate so unique. Because the 
country is attempting to reopen the nuclear issue without having yet 
closed the previous one.

The National Repository established by the 2010 law still does not 
exist. Suggestions for its location have generated widespread local 
opposition, and no territory appears willing to permanently shoulder the 
burden of the country's radioactive memory.

The very "temporary" nature of existing deposits thus tends to continue 
indefinitely. In many cases, the temporary seems to have taken on the 
character of permanence.

This isn't just a technical problem. It's a political, territorial, and 
even cultural issue.

The experience of ScanZiamo le Scorie , born after the 2003 protests in 
Scanzano Jonico against the idea of a national repository in Basilicata, 
demonstrates how the nuclear issue is now intertwined with distrust of 
institutions, delays in decommissioning , and the perception of 
territories as expendable. In parliamentary hearings on nuclear power, 
many associations insisted on a specific point: before designing new 
facilities, the concrete capacity to secure existing ones must be 
demonstrated.

The problem isn't just about waste. It's about the very credibility of 
the state. If the decommissioning of old power plants continues to slip 
from decade to decade, if the national repository fails to find a 
location after more than thirty years of discussions, then the return of 
nuclear power inevitably raises a broader question: is a contemporary 
society truly capable of managing technological processes that require 
administrative continuity, oversight, and maintenance over such long 
periods?

In this scenario, vocabulary is not a secondary factor. Nuclear power 
has always been a linguistic issue. Words serve to shape public 
perception, to make risk acceptable, to transform political and social 
problems into seemingly neutral and technical issues.

It is no coincidence that today we talk about "sustainable nuclear 
power", "energy transition", "technological neutrality", "energy 
security", but much more rarely about waste, contamination or accidents.

In France, where nuclear energy continues to be one of the state's 
strategic priorities, this dynamic is particularly evident. For years, 
sociologists, psychologists, and communications specialists have been 
working on the theme of "social acceptance" around the Cigéo project for 
the deep geological storage of radioactive waste. Even words are 
constantly shifting in meaning. Terms like "reversibility," 
"repository," or "storage" are being redefined to make the problem more 
manageable on a symbolic and political level, diluting the very idea of 
irreversibility and permanence that accompanies radioactive waste.

In short, words don't just describe nuclear power. They help make it 
socially governable.

Even the so-called "new nuclear" is described using a language strongly 
oriented towards innovation. SMRs-small modular reactors-are presented 
as safer, more flexible, less expensive, and more easily integrated 
technologies into contemporary regions and energy networks.

Behind this narrative, however, emerge enormous technical and economic 
uncertainties. Many projects exist primarily as industrial 
announcements, startups backed by public funding, and industrial and 
financial operations built around the promise of a future energy revolution.

Companies like Newcleo are working on molten lead-cooled fast reactors, 
technologies that have been chasing the dream of near-limitless nuclear 
power for decades without ever achieving true industrial stability. Yet 
billions of public funds continue to be invested in the sector.

It is significant that many of the parliamentary hearings in favor of 
nuclear power consistently emphasize issues such as industrial policy, 
the reconstruction of a national supply chain, the competitiveness of 
the production system, strategic security, and the need to ensure energy 
continuity for an increasingly energy-intensive industrial system.

Nuclear power is presented not so much as a simple technology for 
producing electricity but as a strategic infrastructure for industrial 
sovereignty.

It's no coincidence that Confindustria explicitly links the nuclear 
issue to the risk of deindustrialization in the country and the need to 
support new energy consumption linked to digitalization, 
electrification, and the growth of data centers.

Likewise, many companies in the sector insist on the need to rebuild 
highly specialized technical skills and plan investments spread over 
very long periods of time.

Europe itself today appears to be experiencing profoundly different 
strategies. France continues to invest in nuclear power as a strategic 
state infrastructure, while Germany has gradually abandoned nuclear 
power, focusing primarily on renewables. Yet the energy crisis following 
the war in Ukraine has exposed the fragilities of both models: on the 
one hand, the rising costs and industrial difficulties of the French 
nuclear system; on the other, Germany's heavy dependence on Russian gas. 
Rather than a stable equilibrium, the European energy landscape today 
appears to be plagued by profound uncertainties.

Here perhaps emerges one of the most interesting aspects of the return 
of nuclear power in the 21st century. Nuclear power is not returning 
primarily to fuel the old industrial world of the 20th century. It is 
returning within a new energy-intensive economy marked by the growth of 
data centers, artificial intelligence, the cloud , automation, and 
global technological competition.

The enormous increase in energy consumption related to digital 
infrastructure is profoundly changing the contemporary energy debate. 
The challenge is no longer simply to produce electricity, but to ensure 
continuous and stable energy flows to information and industrial systems 
that operate on a global scale and require increasingly gigantic energy 
capacities.

Even some documents critical of SMRs openly acknowledge this scenario. 
Italia Nostra observes that the renewed interest in small modular 
reactors stems partly from the need to power gigantic digital systems 
and IT infrastructures with extremely high energy consumption.

The energy transition thus risks assuming a paradoxical character. It's 
not so much a reduction in consumption and technological dependence, but 
rather an attempt to meet an increasingly gigantic energy demand driven 
by digital capitalism, militarization, and global geopolitical competition.

In this context, the distinction between civil and military nuclear 
power is also becoming increasingly blurred. After the war in Ukraine 
and the Russian gas crisis, nuclear power has once again been presented 
as an instrument of national security, strategic autonomy, and energy 
sovereignty. It is no coincidence that Emmanuel Macron has openly 
declared that civil and military nuclear power are "inseparable."

In reality, they always have been. The history of nuclear power has been 
intertwined since its inception with military apparatuses, strategic 
research, plutonium management, and the building of state power. SMRs 
themselves, in many cases, derive from technologies originally developed 
in the naval and military fields.

And it is perhaps here that the return of nuclear power reveals its most 
profound dimension. Because the atom is not just an energy source. It 
also implies a particular form of economic, technical, and political 
organization of society.

Nuclear power requires extremely long lead times, large initial 
investments, administrative continuity, highly specialized scientific 
apparatus, permanent control systems, and a centralized risk management 
system that no other energy sector possesses to the same extent. It's no 
coincidence that, even in parliamentary hearings most favorable to the 
return of nuclear power, words like planning, national strategy, 
industrial supply chain, safety, regulatory stability, and public 
coordination continually crop up.

Even those closest to a liberal vision of the economy inevitably end up 
demanding: public guarantees, state support, independent authorities, 
centralized procedures, and investments planned over decades.

This is a significant contradiction. For decades, Western capitalism has 
extolled flexibility, privatization, decentralization, and reduced 
government intervention. Nuclear power, on the other hand, inevitably 
tends to reintroduce planning, strategic continuity, and the permanent 
presence of the state.

This is also why the return of nuclear power seems to speak less of the 
industrial world of the twentieth century and much more of the current 
crisis. Energy crisis, climate crisis, geopolitical competition, 
digitalization, fear of European deindustrialization: it is within this 
intertwining that nuclear power is once again being proposed as a 
possible solution.

But this very complexity makes it difficult to reduce the debate to a 
simple clash between supporters and opponents. The issue concerns, 
rather, the relationship between technology and democracy, between state 
and territory, between emergency and consensus-building, between the 
short-term nature of politics and the very long-term nature of material 
consequences.

Because nuclear power forces us to think on timescales that completely 
exceed those of ordinary politics. Governments, parliaments, and markets 
think in terms of years or at most decades. Radioactive waste, on the 
other hand, thinks in terms of centuries and sometimes millennia.

Perhaps this is the most repressed point of the public debate. Nuclear 
power promises energy security in the present, but it transfers to the 
future an enormous amount of technical, economic, and environmental 
responsibilities that no generation can truly fully control.

And as the world experiences climate crises, energy wars, and new 
strategic competitions, nuclear power increasingly appears to reflect 
the transformations of the present: energy crises, geopolitical 
competition, the centralization of technological power, the relentless 
growth of consumption, and the difficulties contemporary democracies 
face in governing processes that extend far beyond the realm of ordinary 
politics.

September 2026

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