Finanziamento UE – NextGenerationEU PRIN 2022 "Nuclear deindustrialization. Human capital, business restructuring, and environmental change in Italy (1971-1999)" PNRR M4C2 investimento 1.1 Avviso 104/2022

Italy abruptly phased-out of nuclear energy as a consequence of a referendum held in 1987 in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident. Since then, the nuclear issue has been removed from the public debate, on the assumption that power plant shutdown led to the end of research and industrial activities, and the dispersal of technoscientific know-how and human capital. Today, the nuclear question has come to prominence again, as the process of dismantling of Italy’s power plants was officially initiated in the early 2000s, including the search for the site of a national nuclear waste depository. Moreover, the current transition to low-carbon-emission energy sources, geopolitical turmoil and recent increase in energy prices have contributed to reopen the discussion on possible moves towards new-generation nuclear technologies. However, the Italian nuclear program, launched in the early 1950s, had substantially slowed down already in the late 1960s, to be partially and ineffectively resumed in the aftermath of the 1973 energy crisis. As a result, Italy was among the first countries to deal with decommissioning starting already in the early 1970s. This Project will suggest a new perspective and periodization of Italian nuclear history, focusing on this early “long-decommissioning” experience: from 1971, when Avogadro - the first research reactor built in the 1950s - was shut down, to 1999, when SOGIN, the State nuclear decommissioning agency, was created and a new phase began. We hold that this long decommissioning was in fact a period of intense technological and human capital reconversion and industrial restructuring, to be framed in the larger context of Italy’s “deindustrialization”, of changes in the nature of state intervention in the economy, and the transformation of its political system. The Project aims at incorporating nuclear historiography into the historiography of deindustrialization, in order to assess the Italian case from a European perspective in the framework of the redefinition of Western “industrial civilization”, and as an aspect of the changing geopolitics of energy and industrial-technological transition on a global scale. As a result, the Project will revolve around four main research areas: - the industrial restructuring of the Italian nuclear sector, its technoscientific adaptation, and changing business strategies, 1970s-1990s; - the long-term evolution of human capital and expertise in the Italian nuclear sector and its reconversion during the long process of decommissioning; - waste management policies pursued prior to 1999; - the environmental legacy and socio-territorial geography of Italian nuclear infrastructures; The Project will reassess the role of the 1987 referendum in the larger framework of Italian economic and political change; it will contribute to the current debate on nuclear decommissioning; and may provide historical guidance for present political decisions on a waste repository facility.