Says Gianni Silvestrini, “As the past teaches us, crises are an opportunity to accelerate innovation.” And to make the right choices by using yet another oil shock caused by Trump & Netanyahu ‘s Iranian adventure as a fertilizer of the energy transition, rather than a multiplier of wars to grab oil and gas. At least in a wise world.
But we live in a (very) imperfect reality where the key word has become “power,” and this is also why to understand the crucial choices we face it is valuable “The illusion of nuclear power and the renewables revolution” (Edizioni Ambiente, 22 euros), the book written in four hands by two of the key figures of Italian scientific environmentalism: Gianni Silvestrini, chemical engineer, former CNR and Legambiente, now scientific director of the Kyoto Club, and Giuseppe Onufrio, physicist, former Anpa and ISSI, from 2009 until a few months ago director of Greenpeace Italy.
The trend of nuclear power
“What the nuclear battge and the hostile framework against renewables are aiming at,” they write, “is a real fossil resistance. Where fossil is certainly meant as oil and gas but also as “old” energies, as opposed to the revolution of renewables, which are innovative, distributed, cheap, and provide the energy security that fossil sources have not given us for decades. The book, in its 236 pages, compares nuclear power with renewables, and what comes out is an unapologetic comparison. With facts, it counters the prevailing vulgate.
“Nuclear technology,” the authors write, “in countries where there is sufficient transparency, has seen rising costs per installed kW over time. Renewables and storage systems, on the other hand, have proven capable of sensational reductions in generation costs. The big hype about small modular reactors, SMRs, has so far produced nothing: not a single plant is working in Western countries, not even as an industrial prototype. And if the issue of economic costs and construction costs is the main problem with Generation III+ reactors, focusing on smaller reactors to be built in series has in the state of affairs no chance of producing electricity from nuclear power at competitive costs.”
An impossible goal
And again, “In other words: while renewables are growing rapidly by taking space away from fossils, that of small reactors continues to remain a mirage that risks hindering the transition both by creating confusion in public opinion and by taking resources away from efficiency and renewables.” A de produndis that goes beyond safety and waste management concerns and attacks the narrative of nuclear power as cheap and safe energy to the core. As does the Italian government, which in the PNIEC, the National Energy and Climate Plan, assumes the construction of at least 7.6 GW of SMRs to cover at least 11 percent of our needs (with an option to go up to 22 percent) by 2050. For the authors, an impossible goal in a country like ours that has not yet even managed to start construction of the national radioactive waste repository (commissioning has been postponed to a phantom 2039) and is costly delayed in decommissioning nuclear power plants closed after the referendum.
The authors tell us that nuclear is vague in order to essentially continue with business as usual that favors vested energy interests. “In a framework of substantial obstacles to the development of renewables,” Onufrio and Silvestrini point out, “with cumbersome and ever-changing authorization regulations, unjustified regional moratoria, energy policy shows only one real goal: to defend the primacy of fossil gas and internal combustion cars. Most of the energy industry is ready to invest in the energy transition, which could dethrone fossil gas and also reduce bill costs,” “but the government continues on the line based on promoting nuclear technologies that do not exist commercially and appear only a diversion to slow down the energy transition.”
The international scenario
After all, as Manfredi says in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard,“If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must be changed.” Or rather, in this case, one must promise change by embarking, strictly only in words and normatively, on the nuclear road. Which we know very well will fatally end up in a cul de sac, delaying the renewables revolution, which even though it would be possible and convenient even in Italy, and leaving a dominant role to gas for decades. So it is even if we do not see it.
To reach this conclusion Silvestrini and Onufrio carefully dissect the nuclear option, from vague SMRs to the nuclear waste problem, from the risks of nuclear power to the military connection to the chimera of nuclear fusion. And then they do the same with renewables, describing the trends, drawing possible energy scenarios, emphasizing how important storage is to assert the dominance of renewables, talking about China, Germany, California and the possible conflicts between renewables and nuclear, even debunking the argument that yes, renewables will be the future but a share of nuclear will be inescapable to make the system work. This would be a useful read for Palazzo Chigi as well.
