Mambo Italiano: Nuclear Energy in Italy?

Enel SpA. plans to build a nuclear power plant in Italy to take advantage of a possible legislative shift in Italy making nuclear power production legal, Financial Times Deutschland reported, citing chief executive Fulvio Conti.

This would be a big change: nuclear energy has been banned in Italy since 1987. The reason for the change would apparently be the mandate voters handed to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, which allows him to go out on a few limbs politically:

Silvio Berlusconi, the head of a right-wing coalition that earlier this month won general elections, advocates the reintroduction of nuclear power and believes it could take five years to build a power plant.

That might be optimistic, unless Italy is far less encumbered by regulation than the United States. Enel projects that it would take seven to ten years to get a plant up and running; that seems more plausible.

Well, if this comes together, that's one more European country to take a shine to nuclear energy. Now to tackle Germany's Nuclear Exit Law.

Comments

djysrv said…

Politicans are always more optimistic than engineers. Also, Italy isn't shy about buying electricity produced with nuclear energy in France. Still, it's a positive development.

http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2008/03/italy-may-lift-ban-on-nuclear-energy.html

April 22, 2008 at 11:09 AM

Luke said…

Keep in mind that it certainly won't take several years to "get a plant up and running" in Italy - several plants already exist, they were just closed down in the late '80s and 1990 - and once that political decision is made, they can be restarted.

April 22, 2008 at 2:03 PM

Matthew66 said…

Restarting a nuclear power plant that has been shut for the better part of twenty years is not an easy task. It took TVA and Bechtel five years to restart Brown's Ferry 1. While certainly it's possible, it might in fact be cheaper to build a new one.

April 22, 2008 at 2:30 PM

How Nanomaterials Can Make Nuclear Reactors Safer and More Efficient

The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior communications advisor at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald.

From the batteries in our cell phones to the clothes on our backs, "nanomaterials" that are designed molecule by molecule are working their way into our economy and our lives. Now there’s some promising work on new materials for nuclear reactors.

Reactors are a tough environment. The sub atomic particles that sustain the chain reaction, neutrons, are great for splitting additional uranium atoms, but not all of them hit a uranium atom; some of them end up in various metal components of the reactor. The metal is usually a crystalline structure, meaning it is as orderly as a ladder or a sheet of graph paper, but the neutrons rearrange the atoms, leaving some infinitesimal voids in the structure and some areas of extra density. The components literally grow, getting longer and thicker. The phenomenon is well understood and designers compensate for it with a …

Why America Needs the MOX Facility

If Isaiah had been a nuclear engineer, he’d have loved this project. And the Trump Administration should too, despite the proposal to eliminate it in the FY 2018 budget.

The project is a massive factory near Aiken, S.C., that will take plutonium from the government’s arsenal and turn it into fuel for civilian power reactors. The plutonium, made by the United States during the Cold War in a competition with the Soviet Union, is now surplus, and the United States and the Russian Federation jointly agreed to reduce their stocks, to reduce the chance of its use in weapons. Over two thousand construction workers, technicians and engineers are at work to enable the transformation.

Carrying Isaiah’s “swords into plowshares” vision into the nuclear field did not originate with plutonium. In 1993, the United States and Russia began a 20-year program to take weapons-grade uranium out of the Russian inventory, dilute it to levels appropriate for civilian power plants, and then use it to produce…

Missing the Point about Pennsylvania’s Nuclear Plants

A group that includes oil and gas companies in Pennsylvania released a study on Monday that argues that twenty years ago, planners underestimated the value of nuclear plants in the electricity market. According to the group, that means the state should now let the plants close.

Huh?

The question confronting the state now isn’t what the companies that owned the reactors at the time of de-regulation got or didn’t get. It’s not a question of whether they were profitable in the '80s, '90s and '00s. It’s about now. Business works by looking at the present and making projections about the future.

Is losing the nuclear plants what’s best for the state going forward?

Pennsylvania needs clean air. It needs jobs. And it needs protection against over-reliance on a single fuel source.

What the reactors need is recognition of all the value they provide. The electricity market is depressed, and if electricity is treated as a simple commodity, with no regard for its benefit to clean air o…

NEI Nuclear Notes

Search This Blog