The list of Italian sites where the National Radioactive Waste Repository will be built has been published.
Developed by Sogin, the CNAPI proposal was validated by ISIN (formerly ISPRA), and subsequently by the Ministries of Economic Development and the Environment. Finally, on 30 December last, the ministerial clearance arrived together with that for the preliminary project of the National Deposit and Technological Park, effectively starting the phase of public consultation.
“The proposed National Charter of Potentially Eligible Areas (CNAPI) constitutes the first step in a shared and participatory process that will lead to identifying the site where the National Repository and Technological Park can be created”, reads the National Repository website.
The places where the infamous deposit will be built are therefore known, as well as the preliminary design of the construction that will permanently house the Italian radioactive waste of low and medium activity. It will be dealt with by Sogin, the state company responsible for the dismantling of Italian nuclear plants and for the management and safety of waste.
The national deposit
The national depot and the technology park will be built in an area of about 150 hectares, of which 110 are dedicated to the depot and 40 to the park. The deposit will have a matryoshka structure: In detail, large containers in special concrete, the modules, will be placed inside 90 reinforced concrete constructions, called cells, which will in turn enclose the metal containers with the radioactive waste inside. already conditioned.
In total about 78 thousand cubic meters of low and medium activity waste: this is waste from the civil world and especially from the medical and hospital world, from radioactive substances used for clinical diagnosis, for anti-tumor therapies, for example , from all those nuclear medicine activities that now make up our daily life. The times for the realization have already been defined: the deposit will be created by 2025.
The reaction of environmental associations
For Legambiente “the safe disposal of our radioactive waste is essential to put an end to the Italian nuclear season and to manage the medical, industrial and research waste that we still produce today. The game has been open for some time, it is not easy but it is urgent to find a solution since this waste has been in many temporary deposits scattered throughout Italy for decades”.
“Now it is necessary that a real participatory path is activated, which has been lacking so far – underlines Stefano Ciafani, president of Legambiente – to identify the area in which to create a single national deposit, which hosts only our low and medium intensity waste, that we continue to produce, while the high-level waste, the legacy of our power plants now shut down thanks to the referendum we won in 1987, must be placed in a European deposit, decided at Union level, on which it is urgent to find an agreement”.
Greenpeace, on the other hand, declares that it does not agree with the strategy chosen by Italy, based on the need to have a single national repository that houses low-level waste and, “temporarily”, medium and high-level waste.
For the environmental organization, in addition to “being the only case in the world of combined waste management, all this has non-secondary implications: such as the possible decision to” nuclearize “a new site, binding it in the long term to the presence of hazardous waste. It is the hypothesis – to be verified – that there is a consent of the citizens, and of the entities that represent them territorially, to host the single deposit”.
