Comment by reddalo
20 hours ago
I'm Italian and I'm super happy with this.
The referendum that made nuclear energy illegal in Italy was held right after the accident of Chernobyl; people voted with their gut, not with their mind.
Curiously enough, some Italian town signs still have a small sub-sign reading "denuclearized municipality" (example: https://live.staticflickr.com/1421/712461235_e46a2c7db5_z.jp... )
As someone who thinks nuclear is both less efficient and much more expensive than renewable energies - would you mind sharing a bit why this makes you happy?
Since all plants in Italy are closed since the 90s won’t it take decades and billions of tax euros to get them back operational again?
It’s not either or, you need both. We haven’t solved energy storage so renewables can’t be the only source of energy. If you look at Value-Adjusted Levelized Cost of Electricity (VALCOE) it changes the calculation quite a bit. We have negative energy prices a few times per year in Europe as it is.
We’ve solved both. The research has moved on from VALCOE to whole system modeling. Including transmission, storage, backup, firming and modeling it hour by hour.
Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper in climates ranging from Australia to the Nordics:
Some recent ones:
Finland, 2025: nuclear scenarios 71–84% higher system cost; unrestricted least-cost optimization builds zero new nuclear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Denmark, 2026: system-level LCOE including storage, flexibility and system integration; renewables substantially cheaper than nuclear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
Australia, CSIRO + AEMO GenCost 2025–26: whole-system modelling including transmission, storage and firming; renewables + storage remain the lowest-cost net-zero pathway. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...
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I wonder why China has brought 27 nuclear reactors online in the past 10 years, with another 36 actively being developed.
If it's actually inefficient, there's no need to have laws against it.
I don’t follow that logic. Because there was a law against its efficient?
The idea is to go to new-generation SMRs, not revive decades-old plants, which is actually impossible.
Aren’t SMRs essentially unproven? I think only Russia and China built some working facilities, and the rest is still under construction.
I mean anything could happen but seems like a long shot
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Countries should definitely evaluate LMRs (Large Modular Reactors) too. Most countries need large amounts of carbon free energy, not small amounts. And nuclear power plant economics have profited in the past from making larger, more powerful reactor units.
But yeah their most modern nuclear power plant was a BWR 4 with Mark II containment, which would probably not be worth modernizing instead of building a new GenIII+ PWR from scratch that lasts a century.
About the last question, i don't think the old plants will play any part in this eventual return.
Fair - but using new (unproven) technology imo only increases the cost/time/risk overall?
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Because both are needed if you don't like gas. Fossils take even more billions so it's ok
Two words: base load
And no you’re not solving it with a buffer (batteries or any kind of other energy storage for that matter)
Is there something unique to Italy that makes it an intractable problem? Where I live we've been able to shift a huge amount of our fossil fuels over to batteries in a relatively short time. It's nice that nuclear has power production 24/7 but it seems unnecessary when there's already a glut during the daytime
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The fact that nuclear is good at the easy part of power production is not a point in favor of nuclear. Grids are built to peak needs; any grid that can handle peak load can handle base load.
lol because nuclear reactors are so damn stable: https://www.euronews.com/2026/07/13/france-shuts-down-nuclea...
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Can you use more than 2 words in your explanation next time? Reciting known talking points offers little.
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base load is a myth
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Six words: base load generation is economically obsolete
Whether it's more expensive or not depends on how you measure "cost", and including intermittency and storage costs for renewables seems to favor Nuclear in many cases[1][2]. Based on real-world examples of countries that traded one for the other, like Germany, renewables look quite bad economically. I know there's a lot of hand waving about how this has to do with how electric auctions work, but this seems like a convenient excuse.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Thanks for sharing those links, very interesting.
I guess ultimately the nuclear vs renewables discussion is coloured a lot by feelings nowadays.
Resources like this help a lot to form a more nuanced understanding grounded in reality - but otoh I have to admit that a lot of this goes over my head - like even trying to understand how the economy works around this is mind boggling complex. I’ll need a deeper look to understand it better and build a more informed opinion tbh
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It doesn’t matter what you think. What does the data tell us?
Won’t it also take decades and cost billions to roll out renewables to the extend that they can even put a dent in total energy usage? So I don’t see how that is even an argument.
can you link to data to prove the economics are bad?
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It's cheaper if you stop caring about safety, right? In the USA it's now illegal for reactors to have adequate shielding - "as low as reasonably possible" is officially "woke"
"as low as reasonably possible" is a massive overkill.
US killing the linear no-threshold model is a good thing. LNT model assumes that absolutely no amount of radioactivity is safe, which is provably wrong.
It has nothing to do with safety if the model that required "as low as reasonably possible" is bullshit per se.
The maximum allowed annual radiation dose for US radiation workers is 50mSv/year. It's just 16x the global average background radiation. And that's the average. In reality it's more like 5x - 25x.
For cancer specifically we're seeing marginally increased risk at 100 mSv/year, but it doesn't really become worrying enough until we're at 300-500 mSv/year.
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In my country, we also have a dormant nuclear plant because of Chernobyl and political reasons.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/world/asia/philippines-ba...
Where in Italy would you put reactors?
https://maps.eu-risk.eucentre.it/map/european-seismic-risk-i...
Sardinia?
For a point of comparison, I understand the Fukushima plant survived the mag 9 earthquake just fine - but got damaged by the ensuing tsunami. Specifically, the water flooded the diesel generators for emergency cooling - and it went downhill from there.
Is the Italian coastline at high risk of tsunamis as well?
That doesn't look good, and that's before you filter by proximity to a large river (that doesn't run dry in summer).
I would say near Pisa, on the Arno River.
Scroll up. There was one in Trino, Piedmont, which I imagine will be among the first sites to be considered.
Judging from the map, Piedmont, Liguria, Trentino, Tuscany and Basilicata have good sites.
Just like with skyscrapers in Taiwan, we can and have built earthquake-resistant nuclear power plants before. Fukushima only failed due to the tsunami water shorting transmission lines and the emergency generators. It withstood the earthquake itself fine.
I think that there are plenty of blue areas on that map
wow, seems like Italy and Turkey are few places where you _would not_ want to go back to nuclear. Wild. I guess the old geezers approving this wouldn't even live to see the first meltdown anyway.
Anywhere on this map. And you'd call it earthquake-proof, and when the next earthquake causes Fukushima 2, you just blame the contractors or something.
we had a referendum in 2011
Right after Fukushima
Wow