Starting from the four Italian nuclear power plants closed with the 1987 referendum. Or rather, from their sites once definitively cleaned and reclaimed from the old reactors and related radioactive material. Ready - but they are not yet and this is a known and gigantic problem - to host the new plants. To be set up by assembling together the mini-reactors of new generation. So let's get started on the big maneuvers to give new electrical life to Trino (Vercelli), Caorso (Piacenza), Latina and Garigliano (Caserta)? "They are the natural destination for future new plants" insisted the CEO of Sogin, Gian Luca Artizzu, speaking at the conference on rebirth Italian nuclear power plant organized in Milan by the League whose leader Matteo Salvini hopes for the construction of a new nuclear power plant directly in the Milan area.
“For a return to nuclear, in addition to its expertise, Sogin is making available the sites of the old power plants that we are dismantling. We dismantle the plants – explains Artizzu – but we do not dismantle the sites. These were designed and maintained as sites to host a nuclear power plant” and their recovery for the new mission therefore represents the ideal solution.
"The first sin of nuclear power is not making it work. Let's think - Artizzu insists - of the Caorso power plant: it worked for less than five years and produced 30 billion kilowatt hours. Today, if we hadn't stopped it with the referendum back then, we would be discussing thelengthening of the exercise, as is happening in the world for similar plants".
Among others, Chicco Testa, former president of Enel, fully agrees with the path indicated by Artizzu. “The sites of the old nuclear power plants – says Testa – still have the ideal characteristics to also host the new generation plants. They have the necessary buffer zones, which had been carefully prepared at that time. They already have all the necessary infrastructures, both those for interconnection with the national electricity grid and those for logistics, starting from the railway yards at the mouth of the power plant”. And in any case “they enjoyed – Chicco Testa points out – a good consensus of the local populations, and the reuse of their sites for new plants would have clear new benefits for the territory, starting from a possible compensation for the development of the local economy linked to the quantity of energy produced”.
“Of course – observes Testa – to give credibility to this hypothesis we really need to accelerate the activity of disposal of the old plants by Sogin, solving at the same time the problem of identifying and setting up a single national site for the waste management".
