By the end of the legislature - therefore by 2027 - the Government aims to identify the site that will host the national nuclear waste repository among the 51 locations identified by Sogin (the public company for the dismantling of power plants), in Sardinia, Piedmont, Lazio , Basilicata, Puglia and Sicily.
The Minister of the Environment and Energy Security, Gilberto Pichetto Fratin , said this, illustrating the executive's objectives in the field of energy during an interview on Radio 24.
Also within this legislature, the minister explained, the Meloni government wants to pass all the legislation necessary to reintroduce nuclear power in Italy.
This is because - he added - "the first fourth generation fission reactors, the ones the executive is aiming for, should go into production at the end of the decade". And by then, the government wants to have the legal framework ready to install and operate them.
Pichetto Fratin has underlined several times that we do not want to return to large power plants, as in France, but to focus on "small modular reactors": in practice, submarine engines closed inside metal cylinders, cheap and easy to build and manage. Four 100 megawatt modules, installed together, provide electricity for a gas-fired power plant.
According to Pichetto, the industrial consortia could directly make themselves "their" power plant. But the time needed to have the small modular reactors, the minister explained today, «is 2, 3, 4 years, the product isn't there yet. There is talk of having the production conditions for these small reactors at the end of this decade. It means that in this legislature we must have everything in place" from a legal point of view".
With this in mind, on 27 April Pichetto instructed the jurist Giovanni Guzzetta to set up a working group to redesign all the legislation on nuclear power in Italy, in view of the return of nuclear power plants to our country.
(Unioneonline/lf)
