Although Italy's nuclear plants have been shut down, the volume of radioactive waste increases every year. This is due to industrial and medical activities. Italy is one of the few European countries that still does not have a national repository.
If you think that, with its nuclear plants shut down, Italy has ever less radioactive waste to dispose of, you are mistaken. Every year the volume of radioactive waste increases by 500 cubic metres, or 140 tonnes. Some of it is waste arising from medical and industrial production, and some from the safe maintenance of existing plants and their decommissioning.
Italy does not yet have a single storage site where such waste can be safely stored. Sogin, the public company in which the Ministry of Economy holds a stake, is responsible for locating, designing, building and managing the definitive national repository, a surface-level engineering infrastructure.
Publication of the Carta nazionale delle aree potenzialmente idonee (Cnapi) — the national map of potentially suitable areas for the repository — was supposed to arrive by August. By that date, a programme for the responsible management of radioactive waste in line with European Directive 70/2011/Euratom was also required. The only countries that failed to submit the programme were Italy and Malta. The difference is that the small Mediterranean island does not have 90,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste to manage.
"This is a physiological delay," said Fabio Chiaravalli, Sogin's head of the national repository, at a public conference organised by the Piedmont region and Arpa. "The criteria for selecting suitable areas are numerous — 28, to be precise — and stringent: the authorisation procedures take years. But this happens abroad too. In any case, we can say that we have begun to build the repository, even if only on paper."
Sogin's senior management offered a preview of what the new repository will look like: "Not a landfill and not a nuclear dustbin either," but rather a series of engineered barriers nested one inside the other. First, the treated and compacted waste will be sealed inside steel drums filled with cementite. The drums will in turn be encased in reinforced-concrete boxes, and all the boxes — around one hundred — will be arranged inside a large tank, also made of concrete. The large tank will finally be covered with a layer of soil and a grassy surface. The repository will occupy 20 hectares of land, 10 of which will be taken up by the waste itself. The area set to host it, however, is 150 hectares, because treatment and maintenance facilities will be built around it — and above all the technology park, the flagship element of Sogin's proposal. Estimated cost: 1.5 billion euros, financed through the A2 tariff component of the electricity bill.
The repository is intended to hold 75,000 cubic metres of low- to intermediate-level waste — that is, waste destined to decay within a few hundred years. This is why the repository is designed to last 300 years. But while we know where to store low- to intermediate-level radioactive waste, the fate of high-level radioactive waste (around 15,000 cubic metres, 6 per cent of total waste) — which continues to pose no small number of contamination problems — remains unclear.
The only apparent solution is a deep geological repository. This option, however, requires the identification of a suitable site — already a challenge in itself — and takes decades to build. The national surface repository is therefore also intended to include a facility for the long-term temporary storage of the most hazardous waste. A temporary solution, designed to last 50 years. And after that? "We'll see" was Sogin's response after one of the most recent meetings. In the meantime, accelerating the entire process must remain in the interest of all parties involved, in order to free up resources to be invested in renewable energy and low-impact disposal.