The Trino Vercellese nuclear power plant was the symbol of atomic energy development in Italy. This is the story of a facility now in the process of being decommissioned.
The sky is grey and threatening rain — one of those suspended days when you can't quite tell how things will turn out. Such also seems to be the fate of the Trino Vercellese plant which, following the halt to nuclear energy chosen by Italians in the national referendum of 1987, is today in the process of being dismantled (in technical parlance, decommissioning), waiting to complete the procedures once the national repository for nuclear waste has been built.
Sogin, the state-owned Italian company tasked with dismantling all the nuclear power plants in the country and building the national repository, has opened the doors of its decommissioning facilities to the public. We chose the Trino Vercellese nuclear power plant, which in its golden years set a world record for operation at full power.
The "Enrico Fermi" nuclear power plant in Trino is the first industrial activity in the nuclear sector in Italy. Edison built it in 1961 and three years later, in 1964, it came into operation using PWR (pressurized water reactor) technology. In 1966, following the nationalisation of the electricity sector, management passed to Enel, until 1987 when it was shut down in the wake of the referendum in which Italians chose to say "no to nuclear power" — a result of what had happened the previous year at Chernobyl. Three years of interregnum followed, during which the plant and its workers were left uncertain about what would become of them. Finally, in 1990, the facility was permanently decommissioned. Since then, the 80 workers employed at the plant today have been responsible for maintaining the safety of its structures and systems. The plant, rated at 272 megawatts electric and 870 megawatts thermal, produced 26 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity over the years. In 1999, Sogin became the owner of the plant, along with all other Italian nuclear facilities, with the obligation to carry out the decommissioning of the site.
According to Sogin's plans, decommissioning should be completed by 2031, reaching the phase known as "brown field" — that is, with the buildings still standing but free of radioactive waste, which is currently stored in temporary repositories while awaiting transfer to the national facility. By 2036, the residents of Trino should see the plant's land returned to them as a "green field": a decontaminated area ready to be used for other purposes. But everything depends on when — and above all whether — Italy will succeed in building a national nuclear waste repository, the location of which was due to be chosen by the government in 2024.
Entering a nuclear power plant brings on that sense of unease associated with everything the word "nuclear" carries with it, while at the same time stirring a fascination with the technology, even if it cannot be described as state of the art.
Equipped with hard hats and briefed on all the safety rules — including those regarding photography — the first piece of technology we encounter is the turbine that once generated electricity using the steam produced by the plant. Majestic and imposing, the turbine is today displayed in the plant's forecourt, as a reminder of the glorious days when the Trino nuclear facility held the world record as the largest plant in the world and the world record for uninterrupted operation. The latter was only broken about a decade ago by the Japanese.
Each nuclear cycle at the plant lasted between 12 and 18 months, after which the facility was shut down for maintenance to carry out the replacement of one third of the core elements. The production shutdown lasted two to three months, a period during which the workforce would grow from around 200 to more than a thousand. In those days it was impossible to find an unemployed person in Trino — the plant absorbed the entire local labour force.
Today 80 people work at the plant and their task is to keep the facility safe through continuous monitoring of radiometric conditions in the environment, the fire-prevention and ventilation systems, the electrical system and all instrumentation. At the same time, dismantling operations proceed on those parts that have been authorised for removal and disposal according to standardised procedures.
Once the dismantling of the plant got under way, all the radioactive material removed from it is transported to reprocessing sites, where reusable material is separated from contaminated material. The latter is conditioned into a chemical-physical form that guarantees its safe transport and long-term storage.
Transporting nuclear material is no easy task. It requires specially approved and geolocated vehicles capable of withstanding falls of 50 metres, an international transport authorisation, and drivers holding a nuclear licence. From the Trino plant, once the decommissioning phase began, 16 shipments departed in 2004 and two in 2005, carrying waste destined for reprocessing at the French facility of La Hague. In 2015, in two shipments, all the fuel remaining at the plant was transferred to France for reprocessing and is now awaiting return to Italy, before being transferred to the national repository.
Having completed the outdoor section, we prepare to enter the nuclear power plant itself — the area known as the "controlled zone", governed by specific safety procedures to ensure protection from ionising radiation.
Once we have finished putting on our protective gear, we climb a narrow staircase and enter what was once the plant's nuclear reactor. This is where the two pools are located — one that held the irradiated fuel and the other used to purify the water inside the reactors.
We then pass through a double security door to access what was the heart of the plant, where the radioactive rods were housed. It feels like stepping into a 1970s film — industrial archaeology with control systems from another era, yet ones that were considered state of the art when the plant was built. It is striking to think how quickly technology evolves; it is natural to find yourself wondering what a nuclear power plant looks like today.
Once the tour of the "controlled zone" is over, we remove our protective gear and undergo a radiation check. Fortunately, the system detects no radiation and we can move on to the next stage of the visit.
The Trino Vercellese nuclear power plant has two temporary radioactive waste repositories, which will be completely emptied once the national nuclear waste facility has been built. Hundreds, thousands of drums stacked one on top of another — all in stainless steel, red and white — containing the history of the nuclear plant. The red drums, holding 220 litres, are the smaller ones and are used to hold the waste; they then undergo a compaction process until they become "pucks", like the reels of a film. The white drums, holding 380 litres, contain the pucks. Today, 2,700 drums are stored at Trino, all waiting to find their permanent home.
The control room of the nuclear power plant is the perfect film set. An enormous console in "hospital green" with hundreds of buttons, switches, indicator lights and levers. Everything is marked out in yellow and blue lines; in the event of an emergency, the console shows the routes the operator must follow to make the plant safe. Mapping out the sequence of operations serves to reduce the margin for error that an operator might make under stress — a system similar to the colour-coded routes found in hospitals that guide you to wards or emergency exits. Fortunately, Trino has never had to experience an emergency shutdown.
The left-hand side of the console is the most important, the one dedicated to reactor control, while the right-hand side was used to manage the secondary systems, the turbines and the alternators. Above the console sits an extremely high number of alarm systems, many of which are no longer in operation. Today a few computers have appeared in the control room — not many, in truth — and they replace those parts of the console that have had to be substituted or modernised.
We have now reached the end of our tour: we are in the radioactivity monitoring area for materials (known in technical jargon as the "monitoring release facility") prior to disposal at external centres.
Waste is separated by type and characterised using state-of-the-art techniques. Radioactivity checks — which last from 30 minutes to eight hours depending on the type of material — are carried out by Sogin, with additional spot checks by Arpa Piemonte. If the material passes the radioactivity level checks, it can be sent to external disposal or recycling centres. To date, the decommissioning of the Trino nuclear power plant has generated 124,000 tonnes of waste; of these, 2,000 have been placed in drums stored in the two temporary repositories, while the remaining material has been sent to recovery centres.
With Chernobyl and the outcome of the 1987 referendum, the fate of nuclear power in Italy was sealed. But the transition from a high-performing operational nuclear power plant to an industrial facility destined for decommissioning created no small number of problems. Setting aside the more obvious technical and business-related issues, one significant problem was personnel management. Some 200 employees — a figure that exceeded a thousand during maintenance periods — found themselves overnight without a mission to fulfil, without a professional goal. Some had only just been hired with the prospect of going to work at what was meant to be the "Trino 2" nuclear power plant. For many, depression set in, particularly during the interregnum between the halt of operations and the start of the decommissioning phase. Others, however, decided to return to their studies and managed to graduate. The 80 employees who remain today have a new objective: to dismantle the plant — perhaps a somewhat painful prospect for those who believed in nuclear power, but a fundamental one for all of us who are convinced that nuclear power represents a threat to the environment and to the health of the Earth and the citizens who inhabit it.