The government of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni approved a bill on Friday (28) that paves the way for the country to return to exploring nuclear energy after more than 30 years.
Italy closed its nuclear power plants in 1990, as a result of a plebiscite held in 1987, in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster in the then Soviet Union, but now the Meloni government plans to return to harnessing this source through small, state-of-the-art reactors.
The aim is to reduce the country's dependence on imported fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions.
“Today the government approved an important measure to guarantee safe, clean and low-cost energy, capable of ensuring energy security and Italy’s strategic independence,” Meloni said in a video posted on social media.
The text will be taken to Parliament, where the allied base has a comfortable majority, and commits the government to issuing, within 12 months after the project comes into force, decrees to regulate the production of “sustainable nuclear energy in national territory”, as well as the “management of radioactive waste” and the “development and use of [nuclear] fusion energy”.
The measure, however, has been criticized by the opposition and environmental NGOs. “Nuclear fission power plants are old and in decline because they are very expensive and generate highly radioactive and dangerous waste for thousands of years. It is more ecological and economically convenient to decarbonize electricity by betting on renewable sources,” said the coalition “100% Rinnovabili Network”.
Traditional nuclear power plants use fission to produce energy, that is, the division of atoms, a process that generates radioactive waste and requires heavy investments in safety.
Fusion, defended by Meloni, but still far from being commercially viable, consists of the union of atomic nuclei through their extreme compression and heating, reproducing what occurs in the heart of stars, which fuse hydrogen atoms into helium and produce astronomical amounts of energy. (HANDLE)
