Italy prepares return to NUCLEAR power
The Italian government is working to build new generation of nuclear power.
Big news on the energy front coming from Italy.
Italy is now preparing to return to nuclear power after nearly 40 years without.
After the disaster at Chernobyl, Italy had a referendum in 1987 to phase out nuclear power.
This has meant that Italy has relied on renewable energy, import of gas and import of electricity.
But now the right-wing government under Georgia Meloni are working to find solutions to high energy costs (which we have seen all over Europe).
Now the government of Italy has announced that they will come with a new law to enable nuclear power to return which will be approved by this summer.
However, it is expected that this will eventually trigger a referendum in Italy where people can vote on it. It is expected that opponents will try to gather enough signatures to trigger this referendum.
And currently, the polls shows that there is around 50% support for building nuclear plants in Italy.
So with the new planned nuclear power plants, it means that Italy can produce much more electricity at home, instead of having to rely as much on imports.
The strategy is prioritizing something called small modular reactors (SMR) and advanced modular reactors (AMR).
They hope to achieve 8GWe of capacity by 2050, possibly going up to 16GWe which would cover over 20% of electricity demand.
These new generations of nuclear power plants that they want to build is not the same as those from before.
The SMR and AMR plants are both smaller and safer than previous generations of nuclear power plants.
In fact, they are dramatically safer, having around 50 to 100 times lower risk of damage to the core compared with nuclear power plants from the 1960s to 1980s.
The risk of a severe accident is estimated to be around 1 every millions to tens of million of reactor years.
Even if the very, very small chance of an accident happened, the damage would be minimal and contained to the plant site because of the design of these new reactors.
So even with the worst case scenario, models have shown that radioactive release into the environment would be minimal or even zero.
And that is for the SMR reactors which are Gen 3 reactors.
The Gen 4 reactors (AMR) actually are even safer than this. The way that they are designed makes a core melt or large release of radioactive material physically very difficult or in fact impossible.
So why have the climate fanatics been so much against nuclear power?
They have pushed very hard for removing nuclear power all across Europe. They have also demanded that fossil fuels be phased out. So what are we being left with?
We are being left with renewable energy, which is notoriously unreliable. Ironically, we have to rely on the weather being correct for produce renewable energy.
It is almost like the climate fanatics want us to not use energy or something.
Sure, renewable energy may have their place. But at the moment, if we just relied on them in Europe, we would probably run out of electricity pretty quick.
Nuclear power of course would be an excellent source of cheap energy.
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