In an evening news digest, a line you could easily scroll past: the Italian parliament has given final approval to a law bringing back nuclear energy. An ordinary energy headline — if you don't know the backstory. Which is this: Italy is the only major country in the world to have rejected nuclear power twice by direct citizen vote: after Chernobyl in 1987 and after Fukushima in 2011, when 94% of voters said no to new nuclear. And now the same country, without asking anyone on the street, is dismantling that ban by parliamentary majority 81–51.
What made me curious wasn't "will Italy allow reactors" — it was the mechanics. What does a country look like after forty years of buying someone else's nuclear electricity from neighbors across the mountains? What exactly did parliament vote for, if the law still prohibits building large plants? And who will sell a reactor to a country where the word "nuclear" has been a political slur for three decades?
Italy started as a nuclear pioneer. In 1946 — earlier than most European neighbors — it created its first state nuclear research body, and in 1958 construction began on the first civilian plant: a British gas-cooled reactor at Latina. Then came Garigliano with an American boiling water reactor, Trino Vercellese with a Westinghouse pressurized water reactor, Caorso. In 1966 Enel announced a program for 12,000 MW by 1980 — ambitions on the level of France.
In March 1986 parliament passed a new energy plan with another nuclear capacity expansion. A month later the fourth reactor at Chernobyl exploded. Population density, Alpine hydrology, the eternal fear that "radiation will come down from the mountains" — Italian anxiety was not abstract: the Chernobyl cloud actually passed over the north of the country, and bans on selling contaminated food in Lombardy and Emilia lasted for weeks. In November 1987 — referendum. Result: program canceled. Latina was shut down in December that same year, the nearly finished Montalto di Castro plant was converted to conventional gas, and in July 1990 the last two operating reactors — Caorso and Trino — were permanently shut down.
The most ironic part is that the country that switched off nuclear didn't give up nuclear power. It just moved: second place in the world for net electricity imports, 55.9 TWh of purchases in 2024 — an all-time record, mostly from France and Switzerland. About 5% of all electricity consumed by Italians is produced by someone else's reactors. Due to gas dependence, electricity prices remain consistently above the EU average: in the second half of 2023 households paid 25.7 euro cents per kilowatt-hour — more than four cents more than France, a country that never switched off its nuclear.
This story has enough dramatic twists, but 2011 beats everything. In 2008 the Berlusconi government announced plans to bring back nuclear and get a quarter of all generation from it by 2030. Enel even invested in neighboring construction: bought 12.5% of the unfinished French Flamanville-3 and created a joint company with EDF for four future reactors in Italy. The schedule was confident: license for the first site — 2011, construction — 2015, startup — 2020.
In March 2011 Fukushima happened. Berlusconi, sensing which way the wind was blowing, froze the program himself, trying to nullify the point of the upcoming referendum — but the Italian constitution has a clever design: without a quorum of 50% turnout, a popular vote is invalid. The prime minister urged his countrymen not to go to the polls at all. Turnout was 57%. Against new reactors — 94.3%.
This was less a referendum about nuclear than a middle finger to Berlusconi: the same ballot voted on water and ministerial immunity, and everything passed with identical numbers. Enel quietly withdrew from Flamanville in 2012 with a return of €613 million in investments — the only profit line in this entire story.
Now about the fresh law — and here's the first surprise: it doesn't build any reactors. This is what's called a "delegation law": parliament gives the government the right within twelve months to write the entire package of implementing regulations — licensing, safety standards, waste management, site selection criteria. Environment Minister Pichetto Fratin's promise — get the decrees done by year end.
The second surprise is harsher: large traditional nuclear plants are explicitly excluded by law. Only small and medium modular reactors are allowed — SMR and AMR — plus the distant prospect of fusion. The Chamber of Deputies added a provision about using mini-reactors on ships. And the third mechanism, which Italy honestly called the most problematic: localization by voluntary candidacy. No maps saying "here's where the plant will be" like they tried in 2010 — municipalities can themselves propose territory for a reactor or waste storage, getting direct money and energy benefits for residents in return.
This is a very Italian solution. After the referendum history, the state drew a conclusion: imposing won't work, you'll have to buy.
Now about why Meloni's emotional "victory tweet" and financial reality diverge. The model scenario being discussed in industry press looks like this: Italy needs 30–40 small reactors of ~300 MW each, a total of 12–16 GW — a tenth of the country's installed capacity, an investment of about €40 billion, a serial price of €3.5 million per megawatt. Sounds impressive, until you put the skeptics' number next to it: by industry estimates, one 300 MW SMR in reality costs €3–6 billion — meaning the price of a "serial" module easily differs from the estimate by multiples, and there is not a single commercially operating SMR in Europe today.
The energy transition counterargument is also concrete, not slogans. According to Ember data, in 2025 renewables provided almost half of European generation (48% for the EU); for Italy the sum by type for 2024 — hydro 20%, solar 13%, wind 8%, biomass and geothermal another ~9% — gives about half even without nuclear. But the price question is in stability: sun in Italy works fifteen hundred hours a year, a reactor — all 8760. The energy component in unit costs for some industrial consumers exceeds 30%. This is where the real, non-political motivation for the entire reversal emerges — data centers: Enel counts ~40 applications from international operators, including Google and Amazon, to place computing capacity in Italy. Google is already signing nuclear contracts directly with Westinghouse. The AI boom is rewriting energy math faster than any referendum.
Against all this — the sober voice of environmentalists. Expert from the ECCO think tank Michele Governatori puts it this way: having rules is good, but the rules will only make obvious what is already true, which is that there are almost no private investors in technologies that are either uncompetitive or not ready. And his advice — invest in what already works: electrification, storage, grid infrastructure.
The personnel lineup is revealing. In May 2025 Enel (51%), Ansaldo Energia (39%) and Leonardo (10%) created the company Nuclitalia — it doesn't build, it selects technology. Chairman — Ferruccio Resta, former rector of Milan Polytechnic. Essentially, Italian industry, which for forty years serviced other people's reactors (Ansaldo made fuel for Caorso and even for Switzerland's Leibstadt), is built into the project as a subcontractor, not a client.
The global showcase of candidates: French Nuward, British Rolls-Royce, American GE Hitachi, NuScale and Westinghouse, Chinese ACP100 — the only one actually operating in trial mode. Experts lean toward Westinghouse as the most mature technology. Positions for future sites, according to press reports, are already being scouted: closing coal plants in Civitavecchia, Brindisi, Venice — places where the grid is already powerful and the population is used to industrial neighbors.
And now the most uncomfortable item in the entire program. The Italian nuclear industry already exists — in the form of Sogin, a state company for decommissioning, which has been dismantling other people's remains for forty years. On the country's balance sheet — about 91,000 m³ of radioactive waste in three categories, and there is still no national repository for low- and intermediate-level waste: a €1.5 billion project is ready, but there's no site. Spent fuel first waited for decades in dry storage, then was partially reprocessed in France and England — with waste return scheduled for 2025. Dismantling of Trino began in 2012, by the promised greenfield in 2024 work was still ongoing. The question from the outside, which is unpleasant to ask: a country that hasn't decided where to put waste from four small plants is planning to build thirty to forty new ones.
Sociology between the two referendums and today's law has flipped. In 2024 an SWG poll showed 48% support for building new plants versus 24% opponents; in June 2026 the Only Numbers agency counted about 55% supporters, with support growing precisely among generations that didn't experience Chernobyl. Thirty-five years — exactly how long it takes for fear to stop being personal and become a history textbook.
And this is the most interesting reversal: the main argument "for" today is gas dependence and prices on bills, not climate at all. In 1987 Italians feared radiation from the east; in 2026 they fear their electricity bill and winter without gas. Opponents are already warning that specific sites and storage facilities will meet the same resistance as before — and legally nothing prevents a referendum on the new law. But it's important not to embellish here: the law's design — with voluntary localization and compensation — is made precisely to take away the subject from a future referendum.
Formally the path to the first working SMR takes, by all conservative estimates, no less than ten years: twelve months of decrees, years of licensing, construction. In reality Italy may get nuclear power by the end of the 2030s — meaning roughly at the moment when it would have been ready if the 2008 program hadn't been killed in a referendum. Thirty years of ping-pong, at the center of which is a question of trust: crowd in the square or minister's office.