About.

This Project proposes a new perspective and periodization of Italian nuclear history, focusing on its 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 phase 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. 

As a result, the Project revolves 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.