FACTBOX-Five Facts About Italy's Nuclear Power Debate
Date: 17-Jan-08
Country: ITALY
Italy, with scant energy resources, wants to diversify supplies and ease its 80-85 percent dependence on fuel imports. Various energy players and politicians call for a nuclear renaissance, but their appeals have fallen on deaf ears so far.
Below are five facts about Italy's nuclear energy debate:
* Italy voted in a referendum in November 1987 to shut down existing nuclear plants and impose a moratorium on new ones, following the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986. Italy is the only one of the Group of Eight industrialised nations without nuclear power.
Italy's biggest power utility, former monopoly Enel, which owned all four nuclear power stations with a total capacity of about 1,400 megawatts before the ban, has now turned to projects abroad to build its nuclear muscle.
* The total cost of closing down the nuclear sector has been set at 4.4 billion euros (US$6.53 billion), but nuclear decomissioning company Sogin has warned that the project has suffered delays and may face cost overruns. Sogin aims to speed up decomissioning and complete about 30 percent of the work by 2011, compared to 6 percent at the end of 2006.
* Italy does not need a new referendum to lift the existing ban but the Economic Development Ministry would need to issue a decree -- which would later have to be passed as a law -- to scrap the moratorium, energy experts say.
Even nuclear advocates say this is unlikely to happen because of public opposition to any big industrial project.
Local authorities in Italy have a final say in a lengthy process of permitting industrial projects on their turf and have blocked construction of a high-speed railway link in the north of the country and a regasification plant in the southern port of Brindisi despite government backing of these projects.
* Supporters say Italy needs to relaunch nuclear energy to ease its almost total dependence on fuel imports, boost energy security and trim power prices -- among the highest in Europe.
Nuclear energy would help Italy cut emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) and catch up with Europe's efforts to fight climate change.
* Opponents say there are no suitable sites in Italy for building new power stations and storing nuclear waste; the construction and decomissioning costs are too high and there is still a considerable risk of accidents.
(Reporting by Svetlana Kovalyova, editing by Anthony Barker)