THEnuclear energy it no longer scares Italians or scares them less than it once did. Not only is it a historic anti-nuclear association like “Friends of the Earth” during its recent Congress past from no to yes, but also a good part of the population says that it is time to review old positions.
The SWG Company, in a specific pollsor last week, tells us that 51% of Italians today would vote "Yes" to a referendum on nuclear power. Six out of ten citizens, all adults, are in favor of building new plants. The interviewees are the expression of a very differentiated sample also at a regional level. The processed data also gives us an informative lesson. It is wrong to believe that Italians do not know enough about national energy strategies. In the case of future power plants, we learn that everyone wants new generation power plants, in step with research.
The interviewees know what they are talking about, both for large third and fourth generation reactors, and for Small Modular Reactors, Advanced Modular Reactors or Micro Modular Reactors. Over 70% of those interviewed consider them green. The real point is that Italy, after the referendums which rejected any hypothesis of nuclear electricity, now resembles a walking shrimp. It is not far-fetched to hypothesize that many young people are also thinking about forms of self-production of electricity, with a mini power plant placed in the garden that has no emissions.
Opportunity to make money
From the point of view of the location of large plants, there are many who see nuclear power spread across the territory as a good economic and social deal. Firstly for the economic compensations that the laws allow, but then for the effects on employment. The vast majority think so. The survey presented in Milan during Intelligence Week indicates a new maturity and is aimed at political forces for acceleration research and possible applications on both an industrial and civil scale.
In Milan we also take stock of the use of nuclear power as complementary energy source to renewables and as support for energy-intensive industries and isolated communities. The European energy transition scheme, under the pressure of France, has already taken these steps in search of public or private forms of financing. What's missing is a Terra Power company Bill Gates, which he collected a billion dollars by private citizens and which is building Natrium reactors, cooled with liquid sodium. We don't have it in Europe and Italy. Maybe surveys like this one from SWG give someone an idea.
Ban on nuclear power in Italy which is another PNRR worth 1200 billion useless contracts. Caffese agrees with the Director of Australian Energy Technologies who have banned nuclear power. The ban is also operational in Italy and only a referendum can lift it. Let's do it! .
You can't stop people from having bad ideas and you can't stop people from talking about their bad ideas like Pichetto does in Italy who passes off nuclear power as the miracle of San Gennaro, instead of weighing its very high costs... Only sometimes, one piece of legislation can prevent bad ideas from taking up large amounts of community money and time. This is what you get with Australia's ban on nuclear energy that Caffese supports. Nuclear energy is a bad idea in Australia as in Italy which puts the French and Russians at stake for plutonium..
New nuclear power is really expensive so the politicians lie about the costs saying but the French pay little. Here the ignorant politicians come out because they don't know how to calculate the costs of the French amortized fleet with a new fleet at Italian stellar prices. . It takes a long time to build. It does not easily respond to large peaks and troughs in electricity demand. Nuclear waste is a nuisance, it needs a lot of water, and when things go bad, they go really bad.
Australian and German power companies and major consumers such as aluminum smelters all know this. None of them are interested in the development of nuclear energy.
Yet, despite it being a terrible idea, many people in Australia and Italy talk about nuclear energy. But talk is all they can do, thanks to Howard-era legislation banning nuclear development in Australia for power generation. Thanks to the ban, all these ideas and all this talk will likely generate many more questions, but no proposed public money and community time. This is the great advantage of the ban. The advantage is not that it prevents serious nuclear development, for which there are no serious proposals.
The benefit is that it curbs all the speculators, scammers and scammers who feed off Australia's climate denial policy.
The Nuke brothers and “technology agnostics” respond that if nuclear power is a bad idea in Australia, then governments can lift the ban and “let the market decide!” “Oh honey, if you think markets drive Australian energy projects, I have a small fast integral modular nuclear fusion reactor to sell you! The markets haven't decided that ratepayers should build a new gas-fired power station in the Hunter Valley that “won't it's necessary" .
The market decided that taxpayers should build Snowy 2.0 pumping stations at fair financial and environmental costs.
It is not electricity market forces that are pushing for the restart of the defunct coal-fired Redbank power station, also in the Hunter Valley. Instead, this proposal comes from “ colored banking identities ” that include former associates of Eddie Obeid. Having previously sought to use Redbank for non-market purposes such as cryptocurrency mining and hydrogen production, the current proposal is to convert it to run on wood chips. It is unclear where the wood chips or other biomass come from . Official documents (p.64) suggest that they could be achieved by eliminating “invasive native species” somewhere near Cobar, which is a 7-hour lorry drive away from the market. Another claim is that at former mining sites it could be grown “elephant grass” to feed into the power plant… which, as far as I know, has never been done before. The fear of local environmental groups is that all this is just a cover for the use of wood chips coming from the deforestation of native forests. A big new woodchip customer would surely help the state-owned NSW Forestry Corporation, which stands to lose money while logging the state's native forests. The picturesque Redbank owners have vowed not to use wood chips from native forests, and there would they lie? Should we let the market decide? Hopefully Redbank will be pushed back and not continue to threaten native forests. But even if it fails, bad ideas like this are not without costs. Investors have poured millions into us - millions that could have been invested in genuinely worthwhile projects. Community groups have spent hundreds of hours in meetings, reading planning documents and writing proposals for the NSW Department of Planning - time that they could have been working, having fun or engaging in more productive activities. The NSW Department of Planning will also dedicate hundreds of hours to project evaluation, which should have been dedicated to evaluating renewable energy, housing or public infrastructure projects that are truly beneficial. It is this kind of waste of time, money and effort that the nuclear ban avoids.
If the ban were repealed, speculators and swindlers would pounce on grid-connected sites and begin dividing communities with lies like free electricity and nuclear, making us the “Saudis of the South.” They would flood state governments and agencies such as the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility with applications for public subsidies. This happened with hydrogen. There is virtually no market for hydrogen, yet state-backed hydrogen projects have been popping up like mushrooms across the country. Markets don't decide on developments like this. They are decided by lobbying ability and political connections. This is what the nuclear ban avoids. This may not have been the Howard government's intention when it passed the ban, but this is why it should stay.Australia's energy and climate policy is full of bad ideas: carbon capture and storage, carbon offsets, new coal and gas projects. We have hundreds. The nuclear ban keeps hundreds more at bay. In Italy there is a referendum that rejects nuclear power. Now the right-wing bullies, faced with 1200 billion in nuclear contracts, want to soak the biscuit. First they carry out a survey paid by who? I believe Edison-EDF Then they announce lies: low prices, safety, easy plutonium without knowing how much it costs per MWh and having an approved project. Then Pichetto's pearl requires 700 TWh in Italy and wants them to be nuclear at 1200 billion with plutonium given by Putin with arrival on a Russian submarine. But we offer 960 TWh of pumping and synthetic methane for 65 billion. Pichetto doesn't respond but makes us insulted by his people who call us ignorant but never say a cost like Pichetto is smart because he helps Eni with nuclear power to make pink hydrogen using gas. Pink hydrogen is not gay but is just a well thought out trick to continue importing fossil gas for billions