Unless a fixed mirage remains in a horizon dated 1987, the Italian nuclear waste storage should materialize by 2025. This time, the Minister of Economic Development, Carlo Calenda, takes the situation in hand - including institutional consultation. Before him, Gianluca Galletti from the Environment and before that a long list of experts, managers of Sogin (the company that manages brownfield sites) and scientists explained to us the need to free the five old plants of radioactive waste.
The subject has been open since 1987, the year of the popular referendum that barred the door to nuclear energy. Within this year, says Calenda, the Charter of suitable areas to host the deposit (Cnapi) will be published. The government is also engaged in environmental impact assessment, while Sogin carries out awareness initiatives to lower the fears of the populations living close to the sites. In Latina, Garigliano, Caorso and Trino Vercellese fears have never been completely averted. The depot, however, will have to collect the isa nuclear waste from former decommissioned or never shipped plants but also from production linked to ongoing industrial activities and nuclear medicine. Over the years, Sogin has accumulated some delays with the responsibilities entrusted to it.
The government, Calenda explained in Parliament, has estimated four years to obtain authorization for the construction of the depot. Among the good intentions also a seminar (perhaps more than one) to explain what will be secured and how. These are methods already in use in other countries, where the sites have been created and work.
30 years have passed since the referendum consultation. Sogin expects an expense of 75,7 million euros for the decommissioning works in 2017 against an initially planned budget of 83,3 million. The difference of approximately 10 million euro is due to the delay in some authorizations from the Institute for Environmental Protection (Ispra) and the delay in restarting some construction sites due to contractual problems with suppliers. Further authorization-operational risks have been estimated by Sogin at 7 million, so much so that, clarified Minister Calenda, if they were to materialize, 2017 would close at 69 million jobs, a value in any case among the highest in recent years.
Little to do with the experience of Soulaine, a French town a few kilometers from Paris, where the storage of nuclear waste coexists with the production of champagne and crops of excellence. With us, it will eventually be called the Technology Park, it will be open to visits and excursions and as early as 2024 it could welcome the return of high-activity radioactive waste processed abroad. We know that Austria, Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom and Germany have expressed interest in participating in the cross-border consultation on the future Italian site.
Their attentions, however, will only make sense if the project does not stop again and in years in which Italy will have to substantiate a new energy strategy. Nuclear power is excluded, but if the mirage of the waste deposit is dissolved, it will also dissolve with 700 new jobs.
