Let's go. It has been officially established Nuclitalia: 51% Enel, 39% Ansaldo Energia and 10% Leonardo. The President is Ferruccio Resta, former rector of the Polytechnic University of Milan. The CEO is Luca Mastrantonio, head of Nuclear Innovation at Enel. The official mission: to select and develop the technologies best suited to Italy bringing together the best industries in the sector. Mission in fact: to establish the Operational hub for the construction and operation of new power plants made from a combination of new-generation mini-reactors.
Perhaps also satisfying the appetites of those who would like to do the same thing and are not part (for now) of the game. Starting with Sogin, the public company created to decommission the old power plants closed after the 1987 referendum, which has already applied to do exactly the same thing using the sites of the our decommissioned power plants. And maybe making room for some other renowned Italian champion, for example New Cleo, a leader in research on fourth-generation mini-reactors, or directly theAeneas, which boasts a recognized world leadership in the race (although the finish line is still far away) to nuclear fusion.
Small, but to play big
But what awaits us if everything goes well? It is true that small reactors will arrive. But no one is thinking of spreading small power plants across the Italian territory. The new reactors SMR (Small Modular Reactor) will be built in series, prefabricated, combined together in large-scale power plants that are very similar if not identical. They will be built, in a first phase, with the best technology currently available, the so-called "third advanced". But on the horizon there is the relay with the mini-modular reactors of fourth generation which should allow the production of nuclear waste to be reduced to a fraction by around 2040. The standardization game will serve to reduce costs, make operational and safety procedures easier, and ensure uniform and therefore faster authorization processes.
The architects of all this will have to be consortia of supranational dimensions or at least with a vocation for both strategic and operational collaboration between players of the old continent, and perhaps not only. In the meantime, work will be done on the other critical side of the challenge, perhaps the most critical: the reconstruction, because that is what it is, of a good social consensus to nuclear energy. The institutions (the Government, local administrations but also public research bodies such as ENEA and CNR) will have to do their part. A delicate and demanding operation, with the aim of guaranteeing Italy at least 11% generation from nuclear to 2050 outlined in the draft law delegating the return of Italy to nuclear power launched at the end of February with all fears and doubts of the case.
Promises to start again immediately
Each module that will be used to compose the new power plants will have a power of between 300 and 400 megawatts. A power plant like those hypothesized for our return to the electric atom will have a power comparable to that of the large plants that already exist, that is, between 1.200 and 3 MW. In the first phase, they will be composed of advanced third-generation SMR mini-modular power plants, for now. A proven technology, with its advantages and limitations. For the heat supply cycle they use pressurized water, which wastes a lot of energy.
Safe power plants? It seems so. A new security level both active and passive has been developed over the last twenty years under the weight of accidents that have created barriers to the "old" nuclear, thanks to technological progress in the equipment but also in the control methodologies, including predictive control of artificial intelligence. All this has produced operational protocols that make the activation of interruption mechanisms and containment of nuclear reaction mechanisms automatic at the slightest sign of failure, even hypothetical. Problems related to the generation of slag.
Towards fourth generation power plants
But here are the fourth generation power plants AMR (Advanced Modular Reactors) which should become operational after 2040. The reactor coolant is not water, which is still necessary for the electricity generation turbines, but a more energy efficient and reusable material, less greedy for resources which are still precious (the water disperses in steam): sodium, for example, is more likely to be the molten lead.
Efficient and above all "cleaner" power plants, especially on the truly critical side of fuel: the mix of necessary radioactive material, now essentially made up of enriched uranium, can be packaged in fourth-generation power plants recycling most, about 80%, of the waste produced by previous generation power plants and that self-produced from time to time in the new nuclear reaction cycle in the same AMRs. However, the most critical waste will still have to be managed, that which decays not in tens or hundreds of years but in millennia, which however represent a residual part of the total.
The dream of waste becoming new “fuel”, the most critical problem of nuclear energy, will begin to become reality. In view of the potentially decisive goal, that of the fusion nuclear. A distant, very distant goal. Decades. How many is unknown.
The roadmap looks far ahead
The first step to take immediately? The construction of the regulatory framework and financially necessary the challenge. Assuming that in a couple of years it becomes reality, the new Italian nuclear power plants could come to light between 2030 and 2035, with a relay towards the fourth generation AMR plants that could be tested starting from 2040.
The pure technology side does not pose any major unknowns since we are talking about starting, or rather restarting, with existing and tested technologies, which only need to be repackaged for small-scale modular power plants. The other three chapters that directly impact the operational destinies of the challenge remain to be addressed.
The unknowns about the social acceptability of the new nuclear power weigh heavily. It is no coincidence that the final version of the government bill no longer contains the hypothesis (which continues to please Sogin so much) of start again from the sites of the old nuclear power plants closed after the 1987 referendum: the investigation, with all its immense critical issues, will start over again. Will this be the hardest boulder to chip away at once? Probably yes. Then there are the unknowns regarding the regulatory and corporate system. And there is, crucially, that financial alchemy called upon to make the operation practicable and above all convenient.
Subsidies and aid in the name of European rules
A technological pool that brings together the best, starting from the initiatives of individual states but aiming at a conglomerate of multidisciplinary companies of continental size? This is the goal. Everyone has to start from something. This is how the newco Enel-Ansaldo-Leonardo was set up at the beginning of January, when the government bill had yet to take its final form. We start from here, in the awareness that the consortium, officially born to accelerate research on the best solutions for nuclear energy but with the ambition of acting as a supporting operational structure for the big business of new power plants, will have to spread his arms. For a number of reasons.
The standardization of mini reactors, and the series economies that will have to be guaranteed, are a critical factor considering the huge financial challenge of the new nuclear, which requires even more than the old nuclear of a colossal financial commitment. A commitment theoretically facilitated by some margins of profitability compared to the solutions of the past decades, if we consider only the side of technology that has become more efficient. But in the meantime the costs that derive from the more stringent constraints on the quality of the collateral works have grown: design, quality certification of cements, safety equipment and procedures with relative structures at their service, just to name a few. Our French cousins know something about this, having seen the times and costs of their new EPR reactors.
Between 70 and 80% of the total cost of a nuclear plant is still made up of the initial investment, which will return profits over time. A challenge that can only be faced by those who have really strong shoulders. And that in any case will need significant funding if not real public subsidies, as also foreseen by the new government bill. Problems of financial compatibility for the state coffers? Certainly. But there are also problems on the regulatory front. More precisely on the EU antitrust rules.
The EU rules on state aid have experimented with more than one derogation to favor nuclear projects within the Community: from France to Slovakia to Spain. It will certainly do the same with us. But to convince Brussels to loosen the grip of antitrust prohibitions, some rules must be respected. precise conditions. First of all, those relating to equal conditions with respect to the actors who are entitled to participate, if they deem it compatible, in the challenge. The closed consortia between companies, moreover directly controlled by the Italian State, as in the case of the three partners of the newly formed Nuclitalia, would certainly be in conflict with European rules.
