Di Beatrice Bedeschi

REFERENDUM ON NUCLEAR ENERGY – On the the 12th and 13th of June 2011, in a referendum  the Italians voted against the abrogation of  the law that in 1987 closed all the nuclear plants in Italy.

At the time when that law was approved,  Italy was facing the aftermath of the Chernobyl catastrophe, that led to thousands of deaths and the poisoning of an entire area of eastern Europe after the explosion of a nuclear plant in Ukraine. The Italians, horrified by what they were seeing, decided through a referendum to get rid of nuclear energy.

In the years that followed, the situation remained unchanged, until the early 2000, when the second Berlusconi government for the first time in twenty years reopened the discussion around the possibility to bring back the nuclear energy in Italy.

But so far, the government had always faced a fierce opposition from opposition parties and anti-nuclear groups. In 2003, 150,000 people joined a demostration against the construction of a new nuclear plant in Scanzano Jonico (in the Southern-Italian region of Basilicata), in what has been described as one of the biggest protest against the comeback of nuclear energy in Italy. The point of the anti-nuclearists was that Italy was still struggling too much to find a proper way to treat the spent fuel from the nuclear plants that were turned off in the Eighties, to be ready to open brand new plants safely.

THE WIKILEAKS CABLE – And it is in this contest of a fight between the State and the local institutions and groups of citizens around the nuclear energy that must be read a classifed cable sent in 2006 from the Rome embassy to the US by the local ambassador Ronald P. Spogli and classified as “confidential”.

The cable, entitled “Italy national elections subject: disposition of Elk River spent nuclear fuel: letter from under-secretary of the Council of Ministers Gianni Letta to ambassador”, describes the attempt of undersecretary of the council of ministers Gianni Letta – Berlusconi’s right hand man – to send nuclear materials stocked in Matera (Southern Italy) back to Elk River (Minnesota, US).

In the cable, Spogli reports an excerpt of the letter that Letta sent him: “Dear Mister Ambassador, I am writing you to call your attention to an issue about which your embassy has probably already informed you. It is a very important issue for the (Italian) government even from the psychological point of view. We will soon be sending our nuclear waste currently stored in Piedmont and Emilia Romagna to France. The spent fuel will remain in France until 2025 at least, when Italy should have its own nuclear waste storage site. This is causing protests in the South”.

 THE PROTEST OF THE LOCALS – Felice Santarcangelo is one of the leaders of the Movimento No-Scorie Trisaia (No-nuclear waste Movement Trisaia). He says he knows very well what protests Letta is talking about: “I believe that letter came after the protest we organised here in Basilicata against the nuclear waste and the centre of Trisaia di Rotondella, where the spent fuel from Elk River has been stocked since 1970. Back then, the general Jean, who was administering the centre, tried to arrange to send them to Russia, but we standed against that as well. We believe that those bars should be sent back where they came from, the States”.

One of the problems related to the Elk River bars, according to Mr Santarcangelo, is the way they are kept: “At the moment they stay in a pool containing water. This is a risky and old fashion way to store radioactive materials, as we have seen in the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Moreover, according to the plans of Sogin, the company that administrates the site, the place is going to be dismantled, and those bar will have to be relocated: this will cost time and money, because they will generate liquid waste that will have to be solidified before being stored in casks”.

THE CENTRE OF TRISIA DI ROTONDELLA – Sogin is a company specialised in dismantling nuclear centrals. It has been in charge of the ITREC Trisaia di Rotondella since 2003: “ITREC was founded in 1965 specifically to study a way to reuse uranium-thorium fuel” explains a sposkeman for the company. “For that reason, in 1970, following an agreement between the Cnen and Usaec, the Italian and American atomic agencies, they received 84 bars from the Elk River centre. Of those, 20 have been riprocessed. In 1987 the project has been abandoned, so we have 64 bars left that need to be disposed of”.

According to the company, the conditions in which the bars are kept are safe, and everything is going according to plans, which means that by 2014 the site is expected to be completely dismantled.

In 2005, after the protests of Scansano, a “Table for the Transparency” has been created to improve the cooperation between local institutions, Sogin, groups of anti-nuclear activists and governative agencies that are supposed to vigilate and supervise the situation.

 A TRAFFIC OF RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS – But according to those who oppose the nuclear site of Trisaia di Rotondella, and push it to be close and the bars to be sent back, transparency is exactly was is lacking in the management of ITREC Trisaia di Rotondella by Sogin and the local authorities: “In 1999 the anti-mafia agency has opened an investigation over a traffic of illegal and highly radioactive and dangerous materials that involved the centre of Trisaia di Rotondella” says Maurizio Bolognetti, a local representative of the Radical Party -. “The investigation was later closed with no charges being made against anyone, but afterwards the director of the local office of the anti-mafia agency, Giuseppe Galante, who had led the investigation, said in an interview to a local newspaper that he received a “red light”, meaning that he was pushed to drop the investigation. But he refused to give further explanations about that”.

NUCLEARE CONNECTION – In that interview, published on the newspaper “Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno” on the 31st August 2010, Mr Galante recalls that during that investigation, named “Nucleare connection”, his agents “founds traces of plutonium at the ITREC centre. Plutonium that shoudn’t have been there, since the centre was supposed to process thorium-uranium fuel only”.

According to a former president of Sogin, Carlo Togni, this lack of security and transparency regards the 64 Elk River bars as well: “The situation at Trisaia di Rotondella is deplorable – says Togni in an interview to the newspaper “Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno” on the 25th June 2010 -. The 64 Elk River bars are badly stored, and they will never leave Italy”. The same article publishes a report of the local police in Matera, which found that the bars were being “solidified through the system Sirte-Mowa, that so far has produced 770 solid elements. But part of it is still liquid, and is kept in a tank”.

 THE “SHIPS OF POISONS” CASE – But Trisaia di Rotondella is also at centre of other, more obscure traffics, which were partly mentioned by the director of the local anti-mafia agency, Giuseppe Galante, in his interview, and that are explained more in detail in the book “Poisoned. This story must be told because it kills our people”, by journalists Manuela Iatì and Giuseppe Baldessaro. In the chapter “the Basilicata case and the massacre of Ustica”, they recall that during the anti-mafia investigation it was found that in 1994 a stock of plutonium was delivered to Trisaia di Rotondella from another centre, Saluggia, in Northern Italy. In 2004 a group of senior officers of Trisaia was put under investigation: in the papers regarding that investigation, there is one in particular that says that 100 metres under the sea off the coast where the centre is located, there is allegedly a boat with tanks containing nuclear waste from Trisaia di Rotondella centre: that boat, according to the investigators, is one of many others so called “ships of poisons” that were made sunk on purpose in order to get rid of nuclear materials coming from illicit traffics.

A MULTI-MILLION BUSINESS – These, of course, are all hyphotesis made by magistrates and police forces that in Italy have been investigating for years the connection between mafia and nuclear waste traffics. But although the thruth has not yet been acclarated, many are the elements that suggest that nuclear waste could represent a multi-million business for criminal organisation, and that the way this materials are stocked and treated by centres such Trisaia di Rotondella is not always transparent.

INVESTIGATION CLOSED – The magistrate who led the main investigation on Trisaia di Rotondella, Luigi Basentini, said in the motivation with which he decided to close the investigation with no charges for anyone, that “the investigation wasn’t able to get enough evidence, but neither was able to contradict the suspect of a traffic of weapons ad strategic materials (in particlar plutonium, which is a fundamental ingredient of the atomic bomb, and which Enea denies to have treated at the Centre), and traffic of radioactive waste through the so-called “boats of poisons”. After almost 30 years is objectively impossible to find out what the officials reponsible of the nuclear politics have done inside the Trisaia di Rotondella centre”.

 In the meantime, the 64 Elk River bars remain where they are. But thanks to the Wikileaks cable between then under-secretary Gianni Letta and US ambassador in Rome Ronald Spogli, we are able to understand that this remains a sensitive and highly-political subject, and it is probably destined to be at the centre of the attention in the future.