Locating the Italian Radioactive Waste Repository: Issues and Perplexities Arisen from Open Data-Based Analyses about the TO-10 Site (NW Italy)

Recently, Italy has started the procedure for the selection of suitable sites for hosting the National Repository for Low-Medium Activity Radioactive Wastes. Sogin spa, a public company, taking into account the criteria of the ISPRA Technical Guide no. 29, solicited by the EU Directive 2011/70/Euratom, has presented the CNAPI (National Map of the Potentially Suitable Areas) which has become operative since January 5, 2021. Sixty-seven sites were identified in Italy as potentially suitable for hosting the repository. Some criticalities immediately appeared concerning the properness of the selection. An analysis was, therefore, achieved to explore part of the rationales underlying the adopted procedure. A paradigmatic site, namely the TO-10 one (NW Italy), was chosen for the analysis, which highlighted significant anomalies affecting both the procedure rationales and its results. Since the selection process majorly relies on geographical data, attention was particularly paid on the role of official data from open archives. With reference to the most updated and detailed ones, we demonstrated that the Sogin procedure suffers from several critical points. In particular, with reference to the TO-10 site, we found that it cannot be absolutely considered to be suitable for hosting the National Deposit. In fact, it proved to match several exclusion criteria included in the ISPRA Technical Guide n. 29. These include: the potentially high “seismic risk” due to a “seismic gap” and complex tectonics associated with uplift (up to 1–1.5 mm/y); a highly vulnerable and extremely superficial groundwater table; a high permeability (10−2–10−3 m/s) of the cover sedimentary units; not proper buffer zones around local settlements. In spite of the local specificity of the analysis, results concerning procedure weaknesses are general. Consequently, we expect that they can be a stimulus for Sogin to more properly face the next steps of the selection procedure.