Farsightedness or industrial and then political suicide? The Meloni Government rekindles the challenge of nuclear energy but it does so in half, well aware of the risks it runs. It has been thoroughly emptied of content. bill approved "preliminarily" by the Council of Ministers on Friday 28 February. Fortunately, some obvious errors of judgment that appeared in the working drafts have been buried. Others remain. The promise they are all there: nuclear as a substantial part of the decarbonisation policy by 2050 and at the same time of the emancipation of our country from energy dependence on foreign countries; Italian nuclear as an indispensable vehicle to participate as protagonists in research on the new generations of the electric atom, thinking about the goal that unfortunately remains distant) of fusion; nuclear as a means to satisfy the growing hunger for energy; nuclear as a means to temper the expensive-bills.
All this in a scenario that sees the desirable resumption of robust economic development and at the same time a transfer of energy sources and vectors from hydrocarbons toelectrification: in cars (exceptions and doubts aside on the stop the heat engines by 2035), in homes (out with gas boilers, make way for electric heat pumps perhaps coupled with photovoltaic panels), in economic and industrial activities.
The reasons, the costs, the timing, the real feasibility of a nuclear return. The preliminary drafts, anticipated by the declarations released with fanfare by members of the government and by the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni herself, in the past few weeks were resounding. Here are the new generation nuclear technologies thanks to small-sized modular reactors (SMR, Small Modular Reactor), which could be put into operation within a couple of years, with the first power plants ready to produce energy in five or six years.
What changes in the final bill
In the draft bill passed last Friday, the timing was simply and prudently deleted. Just as the project to reactivate in the meantime, rebuilding them with new technologies, was deleted. our old power plants nuclear power plants (Trino, Caorso, Garigliano, Latina) closed after the 1987 referendum, also converting the Montalto di Castro power plant to the “new” nuclear power plant, as per its initial project which then foundered with the referendum. Maybe people will talk about it, but naming names out of the blue without having tried to carefully prepare the scenario would have meant igniting unmanageable insurrections. Will they be manageable at a later time? Who knows.
The 2050 target remains for decarbonization commitments even with the return to nuclear power (which in the folds of our PNIEC, our National Energy and Climate Plan, is targeted at between 11 and 22% of our electricity production by 2050). Theories remain on the goodness of the choice, on the virtues promised by the SMR reactors, on the economic advantages of the operation. The inevitable liturgy remains to begin to give some substance to the bill, which for now is completely empty of operational elements. They will need many legislative decrees, which the Government is committed to launching (here the timing has not been cut but rather accelerated compared to the drafts of the measure) within 12 months, with the necessary liturgy of cross-opinions between ministries, parliamentary commissions and research and regulatory authorities. A year to do everything?
The subjects to be given concreteness with the legislative decrees concern the universe of the world not only of nuclear energy but also of energy strategies Italian. There are commitments (with a related legislative decree) to build a supply chain that combines nuclear with hydrogen production (this is right, to guarantee all the economic potential of power plants that must necessarily be in operation 24 hours a day) so as to store an energy source capable of returning additional electricity when we need it.
A decree will also be created new Authority sector, which will administer the rules and ensure safety as best as possible. There will be a decree to facilitate the reconstruction of a system of training higher and university level on the necessary technical skills that once, before the 90s, saw Italy as a point of world excellence. We will examine the financial measures of support for those who will build the plants. But there will also be decrees that promise to provide solutions to things that are already abundantly regulated and that do not have a solution now: the institution of the reform of the bodies of the control procedures but above all (and this is really a problem of colossal proportions) procedures and rules that are truly reliable for good management and waste disposal nuclear, in addition to the rules for their new supply.
Question: what could possibly solve the problem of the absolute unavailability of any Italian population nucleus to host anything that contains the term nuclear? So much so that as is well known our old waste is still stored in dozens if not hundreds of sites. Those who produced it, like the old Italian nuclear power plants that someone thought of "reactivating" but that in the meantime we are still unable to clean up the old useless and dangerous material, and those who continue to produce it, like nuclear medicine or research.
All this without even remotely managing to resolve, despite dozens of studies with relative maps of the "suitable areas", the problem of establishing a single deposit national. A task that has so far only generated powerful riots popular, despite the fact that the plans outlined for building the single repository were accompanied by robust (in theory) guarantees on compensation and related valorisation for the territory and its populations.
But let's get to the heart of some dutiful objections to the contents that survive in the recently passed bill. On the fact that nuclear power in principle can and perhaps must be a good compendium to a energy mix as rational and diversified as possible, the convergences are more than understandable. But precisely for this reason, the analysis of the scenario must engage the best analysts in a framework of formal and substantial correctness. In short, of proven skills. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Interpreting the scenario is not easy. The error is lurking
The reasons for our return to nuclear power? Here is a error macroscopic. As evidence of the insecurity of our supplies and the inadequacies of our electricity generation structure, it is stated in the explanatory report to the recently passed bill that "Italy depends significantly on electricity imports, especially during the night hours. The aging of the French nuclear park and the increase in demand even in currently exporting countries could, however, make this source of supply less reliable in the long term, even net of the change in geopolitical balances". Things are not like that.
As is well known, Italy imports nuclear energy from France during the night hours simply because our transalpine cousins have it. they sell at a steep discount, because they are forced to keep their power plants always on (nuclear cannot work intermittently) and at night they would not know how to use all that energy: their strategy to produce hydrogen with excess nuclear power is stuck and a battery storage system is not plausible with those quantities in play. While we can play on our excellent gas turbine groups by turning them on and off with ease. So much so that on many occasions during the day we are the ones giving a little extra energy to France.
In short, it is convenient for both of us. At night, France acts as our lung (at a low price). When it is short of breath, during the day, we intervene by selling it energy (at a high price, moreover). A system that should, if anything, lead the European electricity markets towards a single interconnected system, capable of pooling the merits and virtues of different solutions. Which can happen today, given that we have solved the problems of reliability of cross-border lines and instantaneous management systems of electricity needs. Thanks to the work of Terna, the national electricity grid manager, the grid has made a real breakthrough compared to that night of September 28, 2003 when French electricity was cut off due to a fault along the transit from Switzerland which caused the longest and most devastating blackout in our history.
Is the new debut's nuclear really new? Not really
Another mistake, or at least a flaw in the outlook. Are the reactors we are preparing for the re-debut really new generation? That is not the case.
SMR reactors are actually an evolution of the third generation ones. The fourth generation will come with the further evolution in the AMR (Advanced Modular Reactor).
The virtues of SMR reactors are, if anything, different. They are “modular” and smaller, so they can be designed and built in series. “Prefabricated” and then assembled and started up perhaps in combination with each other more quickly and at theoretically controlled costs, to build small power plants (also serving, for example, an industrial district that could be the direct architect of the construction) but also large groups of higher power.
The tangle of the real costs of the electric atom
Yes: the financial commitment, the costs, the promised benefits on the bills. It is not an easy question to decipher. The prospective cost structure of nuclear power weighs heavily throughout the entire life cycle of the plant, which needs Initial costs and investment in relation to generation power much higher compared to a hydrocarbon power plant or even renewable energy. Costs that, by obligation dictated by the new international regulations, must also incorporate as provisions the costs of waste management and future disposal and demolition at the end of operational life (decommissioning). Stratospheric costs, which return their benefits over the years thanks to a very low cost of radioactive "fuel" and great production efficiency.
But what final price of electricity does all this really produce? Putting together the figures of the so-called LCOE, the levelized cost of electricity also known as LEC (Levelized Energy Cost), or the net value of the unit cost in euro/kWh of electricity over the lifetime of the system taken as a parameter for these estimates, means coming up against a really controversial scenario.
Learned analyses highlight a certain economic convenience, even if only in the medium-long term. Other analyses, which consider all the cost factors that are often underestimated or hidden (among which, for example, the constraints on the quality level of cements and casings that have delayed the entry into service of the new French EPR power plants for years) arrive at a different conclusion: the economic convenience of nuclear energy today, considering the constraints and costs that concern maximum safety and everything that revolves around it, risks being a mirage.
But by whom and how will the massive funding for companies that venture into the challenge be supported? What form of subsidies or benefits Will the State be able to provide in a scenario that no longer sees a monopolist under total public control, as happened with nuclear power in the past, but a competitive and liberalized energy system, subject to all the well-known antitrust constraints and European regulations that drastically restrict the scope of subsidies?
There certainly remain the advantages induced by the virtues of nuclear power on the greenhouse effect, on CO2 and on pollutants that, radiation aside, are still bringing the planet to its knees. And there remain the advantages, potentially immense, that derive from a providential differentiation of sources energy with a drastic cut in the need for oil and gas, whose supply costs would predictably be pushed down, with a beneficial effect on the average costs of energy and the related final prices on the bill. And in the end the economic convenience of nuclear could, perhaps, be realized precisely thanks to these variables.
The risk of nuclear power as a “shortcut” to new energy
Last but not least, a note on the great basic vice, a bit hidden, which weighs on the challenge. The text of the bill and its explanatory report insist, rightly, on the priority to be given to true renewable sources, reserving nuclear power an important supporting role. But the nuclear challenge will be accompanied by an equal, if not necessarily superior, commitment to renewables and to the reorganization of the energy system in the name ofefficiency?
If we look at what is happening on the front of CER, renewable energy communities, some doubts arise. The CERs had to and must represent a formidable means to aggregate consortia of citizens, businesses and public administrations to multiply the convenience of installing renewable energy plants to rationalize local consumption, multiply the convenience of creating individual green plants and contributing to the exchange of energy with the national grid in the name of efficiency.
But the CERs themselves represent the classic Italian example of the gap between the promises and obstacles of a bureaucracy. And of a tangle of rules and regulatory traps that have produced so far, in our country, only a few dozen. Perhaps a commitment by the Government on these fronts could give greater coherence to that overall energy policy promised with great emphasis in the text of the same bill for the rebirth of nuclear power.
