Nuclear Decommissioning and the Political Economy of Waste: Exploring Nuclear Attachments in Italy

Abstract

Overshadowed by expert and public debates over reactor safety and waste disposal solutions, nuclear decommissioning is a variably long transitional phase during which host communities face numerous uncertainties regarding their future and nuclear sites’ cleanup results. What happens to nuclear facilities when they become obsolete and need to retire? How much does it cost to dismantle a nuclear plant, and what are the socioecological implications of decommissioning projects? Focusing on one case in Italy, this study adopts a longitudinal approach to nuclear site biographies, demonstrating how national regulations, decommissioning funding schemes, technical and environmental characteristics of the facilities, and the socioeconomic conditions of affected communities concur to shape decommissioning projects. My approach builds on recent works on nuclear attachments exploring local communities’ ambivalence toward nuclear installations. I argue that decommissioning processes should be analyzed considering larger management schemes, interests, and constraints that at multiple levels concur to form political economies of nuclear waste.

Introduction

This article examines the decommissioning process of the nuclear complex of Saluggia, in the Vercellese province of Piedmont, to shed light on Italy’s nuclear waste management program and its political economic dimensions. The nuclear site consists of two contiguous compounds installed between 1957 and 1970 in the floodplain of the Dora Baltea river, near the village of Saluggia. The first facility to be built was a research center with the experimental pool reactor Avogadro, financed and operated by a joint FIAT-Montecatini company named SORIN (Società Ricerche Impianti Nucleari). It was partially decommissioned in 1971 and at the end of the 1970s it was adapted to become a repository for spent nuclear fuel, which is still in operation. In the mid-1960s, next to the Avogadro reactor, the National Committee for Nuclear Energy (CNEN) and other private companies established three pilot plants for the closure of the nuclear fuel cycle: two nuclear fuel fabrication plants named Impianto Fabbricazione Elementi di Combustibile (IFEC) and Combustibili Reattori Nucleari (COREN) housed inside SORIN’s compound, and, on the river’s west bank, a fuel reprocessing plant known as Enriched Uranium Extraction (EUREX) operated by CNEN and its successor Ente Nazionale per le Energie Alternative (ENEA). While most of the spent nuclear fuel and other fissile material assembled at Saluggia have been removed and shipped abroad for reprocessing, nuclear waste—including highly radioactive liquid—remains stored inside the complex. After more than 20 years since the start of decommissioning operations and almost 40 since Italy’s phaseout from nuclear power production, around the 70% of Italy’s radioactive inventory sits inside a fluvial plain at risk of inundations.

In what follows, I offer a brief historical overview of the decommissioning program in Italy. Next, I expose the interconnections existing between different levels of nuclear waste management, including regulatory regimes, corporate and public interests, and local communities’ challenges vis-à-vis plant closures. To map out those links, and explore how they shape specific configurations of nuclear waste management policies and practices, I look at the connections between the political economy of nuclear waste (e.g., O’Brien, 1999) and host communities’ nuclear attachments (Saraç-Lesavre, 2020).

In the following sections I illustrate why decommissioning is a crucial phase of nuclear technology’s lifecycle. Adopting a longitudinal perspective of Saluggia’s nuclear site biography, I reconstruct the initial stages of the nuclear complex emplacement together with socioecological changes that occurred between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1970s. I document and analyze the efforts of experts and residents to contain radioactivity within the borders of the nuclear complex and to control its porosity during both routine operations and after accidents and site transformations. I explain how an exceptional flooding event of the Dora Baltea river in 2000 reawakened experts and residents’ awareness of the problematic status and position of the nuclear complex. Finally, I show how nuclear sites get transformed during decommissioning, sometimes in unexpected and apparently contradictory ways, and what the elements are that contribute to shaping decommissioning choices and constraints.

This study is based on both ethnographic and archival work conducted over a period of 2 years (2022–2024), during which I visited Saluggia multiple times. I conducted interviews with local administrators, former employees of the nuclear complex, and environmental activists, who generously provided official and unofficial documentation about the decommissioning process at Saluggia and indicated other relevant sources. I examined ministerial decrees, technical reports, and grey literature available in digital formats online and in hard copies inside the municipal archive of Trino Vercellese. The municipal archive of Saluggia was not accessible during the time of my research stays due to major restoration works, therefore I relied on documentation available through the website of the Comune di Saluggia, where I could retrieve transcripts and reports from the meetings of the Special Municipal Committee on the Environment and Nuclear Matters between 2012 and 2015 and of the Municipal Council. For the analysis of Saluggia’s nuclear history I relied on newspaper archives, the archive of the former National Committee for Nuclear Energy (CNEN), documentary reports, and oral interviews as indicated throughout the article.

A Brief History of Nuclear Decommissioning in Italy

Following the results of a national referendum promoted after the Chernobyl accident by a large anti-nuclear coalition, in 1987 the Italian government decided to interrupt the operations of its four nuclear power plants and other reprocessing and fuel manufacturing facilities (Hine, 1988). In the absence of a national repository for nuclear waste and lacking regulatory guidelines specific to decommissioning, ENEL (the public company managing nuclear power plants) and ENEA (the successor of CNEN, National Committee on Nuclear Energy) adopted a “passive custody” strategy, maintaining and monitoring the sites to ensure their integrity, while removing nuclear fuel and other fissile material. Previous decommissioning experiences in Italy were limited to dismantling small research reactors, performed according to existing maintenance and decontamination protocols (Laraia, 2024). After the mid-1990s, new European directives solicited member states to adopt active decommissioning policies, involving immediate dismantling and sites release. The Italian parliament updated the national legislation to comply with EU directives and recommendations, but the application of the new norms has been incredibly slow (Di Nucci, 2015).

The Ministry of Industry liberalized the national energy sector in 1999, putting ENEL’s monopoly to an end. In this context, SOGIN (Società per la Gestione degli Impianti Nucleari—Public Company for the Management of Nuclear Facilities) was created with the mission of decommissioning all nuclear power plants and most of the facilities present on the national territory (Elli, 2024). In 2003, the Italian government attempted to force an acceleration of the process of finding a waste solution, declaring radioactive waste a national security emergency, due to potential site intrusions by terrorist groups. ¹ Soon after that, a press agency published a note announcing that the government was about to issue an executive decree for the siting of a centralized deep geological repository near the small town of Scanzano Jonico, on the Ionian coast of the Basilicata region. The Berlusconi administration’s top-down solution encountered a massive wave of protests that forced the government to halt the project (Montemurro, 2004; Zinn, 2007). In reality, Berlusconi’s move was propaedeutic to a restart of the Italian nuclear program, an aspiration that the center-right coalition cultivated until the Fukushima accident in 2011, after which in another national referendum the majority of Italians rejected the proposal. The consequent 5-year moratorium on nuclear energy pushed the Italian parliament to approve new rules for speeding up waste storage and decommissioning procedures (Ferrazzano & Scarabotti, 2012). The current outlook is based on the construction of a surface repository (as in Spain and France) for the low and medium activity nuclear waste that is now located at multiple sites throughout Italy. This plan concerns the storage of the material resulting from the reprocessing of spent fuel shipped since the early 1990s to France and England and not yet repatriated. Despite this, SOGIN’s goal to build a national repository keeps being postponed, with the consequence that nuclear waste still sits inside facilities and research centers that had not been designed for that purpose.

Containment and the Political Economy of Nuclear Waste Management

Rather than being a residual phase at the end of the production-consumption chain, wasting and disposal practices play an important role in the formation of sociotechnical orders. As Liboiron and Lepawsky (2022, p. 83) underline: “The way waste flows in some ways and not others, to the benefit of some groups more than others, in line with certain ideals and values but not others, is power.” Over the past 20 years, social studies of waste have uncovered the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of waste and wasting, including garbage’s flows, commodification and valuation dynamics, emplacement and disposal systems and labor, scavanging, and toxic effects (Hetherington, 2004; Liboiron & Lepawsky, 2022; O’Brien, 1999; Reno, 2011, 2015; Resnick, 2024).

Arguing against Douglas’s (1966) famous definition of dirt as “material out of place” disrupting social order, O’Brien (1999, p. 273) contends that waste never leaves the social system in which it is produced. Instead

wasting represents a process of generating a political economy in order to confer values on objects. If waste, a material form of collective dirt, is ambiguous this is because the process of wasting is a field of social, political, and economic struggle.

Using nuclear waste as the ultimate example of dirt’s material obduracy, O’Brien (1999, pp. 279, 280, emphasis in the original) argues that:

Only certain dimensions of the values of material objects are economically depleted, converted and dispersed. Waste management is precisely the political economic activity that demonstrates this beyond doubt: “waste” does not go away. … If the physical and engineering sciences, as well as the human and policy sciences, have addressed waste as a temporary nuisance that can be “cleaned up” or “recovered,” they struggle enormously to comprehend the immeasurable objectivity of nuclear “waste.” Here is a material object that refuses to “depart from the economic system”; one whose depletion is on a time scale so vast that it exceeds any conceivable scientific culture’s capacity to “clean up” the stains it leaves behind. … In the case of nuclear waste, it is strikingly obvious that, whilst it may lie around threatening planetary life even when it is not actively being “exchanged,” it cannot be said to have been “finally consumed” by individuals and groups. Yet, nuclear waste only exposes in an obvious way what waste stands for: a means of managing the transformation of values characteristic of a world of goods.

The impossibility of getting rid of radioactive waste or of disposing of it in a definitive way continues to be one of the most critical aspects of nuclear energy production. Containment of nuclear materials and radioactivity within proper spaces and below established safety threshold is a precondition for the operability of nuclear power plants, and the continuation of the nuclear predicament into the future. Since its inception the nuclear industry has rhetorically and materially constructed systems of containment to gain public acceptance, and political and economic support (Balogh, 1991; Edwards, 1996; Jasanoff & Kim, 2009; Orsini, 2024; Walker, 1992). Borrowing from Canetti’s (1962, p. 290) famous statement that “secrecy lies at the very core of power,” I contend that containment lies at the very core of nuclear power. To fully understand how containment works we need to retrieve the archaic meaning of the verb contineo (from Latin cum tineo to hold together) and think of it as a set of organizing principles and practices that make nuclear power production appear as if it is possible because it is safe (Schoot & Mather, 2022). In this sense, containment indicates the integration of multiscalar practices for the management and isolation of radioactive substances through all phases of the nuclear production cycle: from the design of casks for fuel transportation and spent fuel isolation to the construction of reactor containment vessels and domes; from the establishment of safety and exposure thresholds to the categorization of nuclear waste and the regulation of its treatment (Cram, 2023; Felt, 2017; Galison & Moss, 2015; Ialenti, 2020, 2021; Meyer, 2024).

Underlining the ethical and technopolitical dimensions of waste management solutions such as “consolidated interim storage” and “consent-based siting,” Kinsella (2020) posits that “a new political economy of nuclear waste” is emerging, where nuclear facilities’ decommissioning, waste management and disposal, and proposals to expand nuclear power production, interact in complex ways. ² In other words, demonstrating that decommissioning nuclear facilities is safe and economically sustainable strengthens the image of nuclear power as the energy of the future. Building on Kinsella’s argument, Bell and Macfarlane (2022) show how in the U.S. technofixes such as the consolidation of interim spent fuel storage practices—together with the vertical integration of waste management companies and services, the privatization of decommissioning sites, and the financial capitalization of corporate organizations specialized in the management and disposal of nuclear waste—only transform spent fuel into matter “in flux” without arriving at definitive solutions. Thus, containment of radioactive and radioactively contaminated material presupposes the organization of socioecological and economic relations that assign value to nuclear waste management and disposal as safe. Containment is both the engine and the final goal of political economies of nuclear waste that include also regional and local dynamics, such as host communities’ experiences and involvement with the emplacement, operation, and closure of nuclear installations (Greco & Yamamoto, 2019). Nuclear decommissioning offers an analytical vantage point to study the interconnectedness of all elements that shape political economies of nuclear waste and should be examined within this larger perspective. At the same time, decommissioning projects are transformative processes that challenge the taken-for-granted identity of nuclear sites and of host communities, potentially allowing for alternative (pre-existing and/or imaginative) views of place to (re)emerge (Casey, 1996; Cosgrove, 1985; Lefebvre, 1991; Pasqualetti, 1989, 1990; Yamamoto & Greco, 2022).

Historicizing Nuclear Attachments Through Decommissioning

In her insightful exposé of Carlsbad’s attachment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, Saraç-Lesavre explores how local groups engage “in the enterprise of desiring and being desirable for nuclear waste futures” through a process of mobilization that she describes as “proactive valuation undertakings” (Saraç-Lesavre, 2020, p. 755). According to Saraç-Lesavre (2020), it is difficult to explain these undertakings as only instrumental to obtaining an economic compensation for the sacrifice of hosting hazardous material. The emplacement of the nuclear waste isolation facility is also a moral project: Carlsbad community representatives see themselves as uniquely positioned to serving the nation thanks to the characteristics of their environment and of their social milieu. Carlsbad residents, especially nuclear employees, see their participation in the operation of the facility as a way to reclaim authority over their underground environment which otherwise would be used and controlled by external actors.

Likewise, in the case of the Fernald plutonium production facility clean-up in Ohio, Huegel (2024) shows that despite the environmental harm caused by the plant during the Cold War, local activists suggested to keep some of the nuclear waste on site after decommissioning because they did not want to transfer the burden of their toxic legacy to somebody else, somewhere else. Adopting similar interpretative lens, Bell (2025) has uncovered how geographically and historically situated processes of moral and ethical self-representation concur to the formation of “nuclear communities” willing to host waste disposal facilities in Canada. These important contributions advance symmetrical analyses of nuclear host communities who actively invoke ethical and moral categories to claim their pivotal roles in the management of nuclear waste. These rich explorations into different nuclear landscapes (Pitkanen & Farish, 2018) complement economistic interpretations and classic explanations of nuclear “peripheralization” (Blowers, 2017; Blowers & Leroy, 1994) and push us to consider the existence of an understudied “moral economy” of nuclear waste (Thompson, 1971).

The case of Saluggia exemplifies the inextricable ties between nuclear facilities’ decommissioning processes and waste disposal options and limitations, national regulatory regimes and local dynamics. My analysis historicizes local communities’ attachments to nuclear sites by showing how they change over time and that local attitudes are never completely homogenous. Acceptance of, desire for, resistance to, and identification with nuclear power applications often coexist in tacit or explicit ways and do change.

In this article I introduce a framework for the analysis of nuclear sites’ biographies to document the changes of nuclear technology’s socioecological entanglements and to explain how they influence decommissioning choices, operations, and outcomes. I show that it is impossible to understand decommissioning projects without considering the history, technical designs, purposes, and environmental conditions of nuclear facilities, together with local communities’ attachments to nuclear sites (Dawney, 2019; Hecht, 1997; Wall, 2019; Zonabend, 2010). In addition, this study attends to the details of decommissioning projects and their pragmatic dimensions (including preparatory work, reassembling hazardous material, interim containment solutions, and representational strategies) to expose the “bureaucratic spectacles” of waste removal efforts, whose results are always incomplete (Balayannis, 2020).

Saluggia’s Legacy and the Political Economy of Nuclear Waste in Italy

Sitting 2 km north-east of the river Dora Baltea’s left bank upstream of the confluence with the Po river (Italy’s most major watercourse), the village of Saluggia is a quiet corner of central Piedmont. Looking through the windows of the regional train from Chivasso, just one hour from the regional capital Turin, one can glance at variously cultivated fields punctuated with abandoned factories and decrepit buildings, left over from the deindustrialization that hit this part of Italy at the end of the 1990s. Saluggia’s train station looks like one of those phantom factories and storage buildings: its doors barred and rusty, no working personnel, and only a few travelers boarding and getting off the wagons. Walking toward the central square in the morning one gets the impression of a desolate, empty town. Several shops have been closed years ago, once popular locandas are shut down, and only a handful rural hostels and rental units are available to workers and travelers. Yet the roads look recently paved, the sidewalks seem perfectly restored, and the renewed municipal library is open every weekday. I learned that Saluggia has good social services and local taxes are quite low. “With the money we receive from the government for hosting the nuclear facilities we can do a lot of things that otherwise would be out of our budget,” a member of the local administration told me. Since 2003, Saluggia—like eight other localities in Italy—receives more than 2 million euros each year in governmental compensations for the presence of decommissioning sites, and an additional 2 million is distributed in the Province of Vercelli and six neighboring municipalities (CIPE, 2021). Altogether, this territory gets almost one third of the national funds, given that it hosts the hottest radioactive inventory of Italy. In 2020, the municipalities of Trino Vercellese (25 km from Saluggia) and Caorso, hosting two of Italy’s four shut nuclear power plants, won a legal battle against the central government, which in 2006 unilaterally decided to cut up to 70% of the compensation funds destined to nuclear communities. The former mayor of Saluggia, Firmino Barberis, saluted the court decision with sober optimism considering the implications for his town: “This ruling is uplifting. Now we hope to have justice and to receive the money [around 23 million euros] for completing the public works that we had planned” (Maggio & Orrù, 2020).

Società Gestione Impianti Nucleari (SOGIN), the public company financed through electrical consumption and founded in 1999 to manage shut down nuclear facilities, has operated in Saluggia since the early 2000s. ³ “The community of Saluggia has cohabited with nuclear power for over 30 years. Now it looks like we are at a turning point. We can see a green field on the horizon instead of nuclear waste,” announced mayor Franco Barbero in 2003, reassuring that: “constant information will be provided to all citizens and transparency will characterize all communication activities” (Barbero, 2004, author’s translation).

Twenty years later the hopes and expectations of the Saluggesi did not materialize. According to SOGIN’s original plans, the site should have been in a brown field condition by 2019, but now the deadline has shifted to 2035. In the meantime, decommissioning costs have almost doubled nationally (from 4.5 billion euros to more than 7 billion). Most of the spent fuel elements and other fissile materials coming from shut down power plants have been shipped to the UK and France for reprocessing. According to the agreement signed with France in 2006, 235 tons of reprocessed fuel should have been repatriated in Italy between 2020 and 2025 but the absence of a national repository did not allow it. ⁴ The Italian Government now needs to find a solution, which will probably consist in the temporary extension of the abroad storage agreements. At the end of 2025, the Council of Ministers gave SOGIN permission to acquire the Avogadro deposit inside Saluggia’s nuclear complex from Stellantis (ex FIAT group) (Boeris, 2025). The green light for the acquisition triggered parliamentary inquiries and raised suspicions that SOGIN’s real plan is to use the deposit to store the waste coming from France and the UK (La Mattina, 2026; Maggio, 2025). At Saluggia both solid and liquid residues already sit inside the former EUREX plant and SORIN’s Avogadro reactor pool, including 64 spent fuel elements that France, in light of Italy’s incapacity to comply with the 2006 agreement, refuses to reprocess (ISIN, 2022; Zorloni, 2022).

Given the recent developments, the timeline for the decommissioning of Saluggia’s nuclear complex is more and more uncertain. Dr. Franco Pozzi, retired EUREX director, former mayor of Saluggia, and last chairman of the special municipal committee on environmental and nuclear matters told me, with a shrug of resignation, that “SOGIN has postponed the end date of decommissioning so many times that when they announce a new deadline it’s hard to believe them.” A major figure of the national and local nuclear expert network, Pozzi arrived in Saluggia in the early 1970s. Given his active participation in the political life of the community, Pozzi is an example of what Saraç-Lesavre (2020) defines as “hybrid individuals,” who can rely on both their technical expertise and public visibility to gain credibility and trust, acting as cultural brokers. In contrast to Carlsbad’s case, though, Pozzi’s expertise did not allow him to influence the debate over SOGIN’s decommissioning activities in effective ways. Instead, Saluggia’s administrators have often perceived his critical voice as an obstacle toward establishing more diplomatic, and discrete relations with the decommissioning agency. This prudent strategy though does not seem to bring more positive results, as a member of the local administration admits:

Clearly this is a problem we want to see solved once and for all but things are moving very slowly, and we do not have much of a say on how decommissioning is being done. (Anonymous, interview with the author)

Some Saluggesi, like journalist Umberto Lorini, instead believe that both SOGIN and local administrations are not interested in accelerating the process as long as compensation funds keep coming their way: “A friend of mine calls it the Devil’s money,” he said in an interview with the author. A longtime environmental activist, Lorini is the president of Legambiente Piemonte and sits on the special municipal committee of Trino Vercellese that oversees the decommissioning project of the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Power Plant: “We had a similar committee since the end of the 1970s, but after 2017 it does not exist anymore. Current administrators prefer to manage the problem with experts and consultants of their choice, leaving residents out of the door.” Governmental compensations for obsolete nuclear facilities continue to provide economic resources to the Vercellese territory, without creating new jobs. ⁵ Lorini explained to me that municipalities like Saluggia spend the funds improperly on public works and social services, including tax cuts, creating in fact a dangerous dependency:

The money should be destined to environmental preservation and restoration activities, as the law prescribes, but they keep using it to run their budgets instead. I am wondering what they will do once decommissioning is over and the money with it.

In 2018 and 2019 the municipality of Saluggia employed its compensation funds for the stipends of ecological operators, but also for the abatement of the tariffs on private waste collection and disposal, to finance social services such as school food stamps and a new school bus, for the acquisition of new books for the local library, for unspecified “investements,” and in support of “recreational associations” (MASE, 2021, p. 17).

The avalanche of money that several territories received after their legal victory in 2020 marked another turning point in the political economy of nuclear waste management in Italy. The compensation system is an ambiguous mechanism, recognizing the anomaly of the situation and quantifying the risks to which host communities are subjected by assigning a monetary value onto them. On the other hand, compensations contribute to the indefinite procrastination of finding a better solution, which in the Italian case would mean building a centralized surface repository (SOGIN, 2018). In the absence of a national repository, nuclear waste is “contained” at decommissioning sites which have been transformed into de facto interim storage areas. As I will show further below, at Saluggia, this transformation started several decades ago, even before decommissioning became a matter of public concern.

The Emplacement of Saluggia’s Nuclear Complex: Modernity at Last?

The nuclear history of Saluggia started in the mid-1950s, when FIAT and Montecatini created a joint venture company named Società Ricerche Impianti Nucleari (SORIN) to gain experience in the fast developing field of applied nuclear science and technology (UGAF, 2003). In 1958, the newly formed company started the construction of an experimental pool reactor (MTR)—acquired from American Machine and Foundry in the context of “Atoms for Peace”—named Avogadro after the illustrious 18th century chemist (Figure 1; Curli, 2023; SORIN, 1959a). SORIN.

Figure 1.

Avogadro reactor under construction in 1958.

In the 1950s, when the technology was still young and its safety uncertain, reactor isolation with low population density constituted primary siting criteria (Di Nunno et al., 1962; Okrent, 1982). In 1959, Saluggia had 4,000 residents and only 10,000 people lived within a radius of five kilometers. SORIN’s experts considered that:

The selected site is not surrounded by particularly relevant hilltops that can be invested by a potential radioactive cloud and be heavily contaminated. The reactor is not located in the immediate proximity of waterways that in case of explosion [sic!] can receive radioactive material, through direct discharge or indirectly. … Water that might be contaminated is treated until its activity is well below the allowed dose for ingestion, and only after proper monitoring … is discharged into the Dora Baltea. (SORIN, 1959b, pp. 36–37).

In addition to its good hydro-geological and meteorological conditions (at least according to the parameters of the 1950s), Saluggia was conveniently located along the Milan–Turin railway line and easily accessible through the motorway connecting the two cities. Furthermore, the village was a Christian Democrat enclave in a predominantly rural area with a potential reserve of non-unionized workers to be employed in non-technical positions (Mattina & Pellegrino, 2023).

Contained inside a 10 cm thick reinforced concrete building with a diameter of 32 m wide and 24 m high, Avogadro was a small research reactor able to adapt to different kinds of experiments: from the irradiation and testing of materials to the production of isotopes for medical applications (SORIN, 1959a).

The installation of SORIN’s research center was only the first step towards the emplacement of a series of pilot facilities that promised to transform Saluggia into the “atomic capital” of Italy (Macchiavello, 1970). At the beginning of the 1960s, CNEN decided to acquire the rest of SORIN’s property next to the river. “It was a swampy area that nobody wanted, so we were more than happy to let it go,” confessed Enrico Adduci, one of SORIN’s first employees to arrive in the village at the end of the 1950s (Gaglione et al., 2014). CNEN established a pilot facility there for the reprocessing of spent fuel named EUREX (Enriched Uranium Extraction; Anon, 1965, 1966; Rolandi, 2020; Tosi & Antonelli, 1967). Construction works started in 1965 and the plant became operational in 1970. The nuclear committee assessed that the future development of a national program depended on Italy’s capacity to close the nuclear fuel cycle, and with the approval of the Government, encouraged the formation of new public and private companies whose core business became nuclear fuel fabrication. Two fuel production facilities were installed in Saluggia as well. The Impianto Fabbricazione Elementi di Combustibile (IFEC) plant produced fuel elements for the Avogadro reactor and other materials inside SORIN’s compound. A few years later, FIAT, Breda, and Westinghouse created Combustibili Reattori Nucleari (COREN) a company that fabricated nuclear fuel elements for pressurized water reactors, also housed inside the SORIN center (Anon, 1967; Villani, 1968). CNEN’s pilot projects reinvigorated the hopes of the Saluggesi at a time when, due to economic losses and its inability to attract external funds, SORIN’s future became uncertain (Anon, 1968). Old-time residents and retired nuclear employees told me that the advent of the nuclear complex changed the lives of many Saluggesi:

You should imagine a place where almost everybody was a farmer. The nuclear industry brought here new people, technicians, engineers—although most of them resided in bigger urban areas like Turin and commuted every day. Locals found new job opportunities and better salaries. (Anonymous, interview with the author)

Before the erection of the “atomic citadel,” Saluggia was known for its production of red and white striped beans, for the small artisanal manufacturers of wooden clogs, and horsehair and lacustrine algae used as textile material (Capisano & Rosetta, 2005; Della Mula, 1916; Faldella, 1943; FIAT, 1959, p. 2). The installation of the nuclear compounds between 1958 and 1970 not only changed the social stratification of the community but also the river floodplain, or Là suta (down there) as the locals used to call it (FIAT, 1990; Gaglione et al., 2014). In his memoire, one of SORIN’s employees recalls that fishermen and farmers feared that “the atom’s people will ruin the area by the Dora Baltea irremediably” (Adduci, 2012, pp. 97–98). Between 1957 and 1959, SORIN purchased 150 hectares of land originally subdivided into more than 300 plots belonging to families that cultivated the fields for their domestic consumption (UGAF, 2003). Diffidence and preoccupation about the imminent transformation of this rural town ran through significant sectors of the local community, but only a few residents today remember those initial controversies, supplanted by hegemonic narratives depicting the village as a place brought into history by nuclear modernization. ⁶ For example, a promotional brochure produced by the local administration some years ago describes Saluggia as “the land of beans, nuclear technology, and medical technologies” ⁷ (see Figure 2). Attempts to patch together and smooth down apparently contradictory elements of Saluggia’s identity are not always effective, as I discovered when talking to residents who have ambivalent feelings about the uncertain future of the nuclear installations’ decommissioning process and express a sense of precarity when contemplating current waste management solutions for the site.

Figure 2.

Saluggia. Terra dei fagioli, del nucleare, delle tecnologie medicali. Promotional brochure. Comune di Saluggia, 2016. Personal Archive, Franco Pozzi.

Within/Without: Chronicles of Containment Efforts

Routine Discharges and Containment Breaches

The reasons that led CNEN to authorize the construction of two fuel fabrication plants and a reprocessing facility in one of the densest hydrological zones of Italy are not clear. A vital network of canals and irrigation diches (rogge) crisscrosses the river floodplain stretching into the Val Sesia. The nuclear complex includes two distinct, but contiguous research and production compounds situated inside a triangle delimited at north-west by the river Dora Baltea, by the Cavour Canal on the south, and by the Farini Canal on the west (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Map of the Saluggia Complex (drawings by author).

The presence of the tap water wells of the Acquedotto del Monferrato (with a population of almost 300,000) 2 km downstream of the nuclear facilities has raised many questions about the opportunity of the original siting choice (Ceretto Castigliano, 2014; Report, 2008). In a radioecological study conducted in 1971 around the EUREX plant, CNEN experts admitted: “It’s necessary to observe that the lack of any preliminary radioecological analysis of the environment has led to the siting of a reprocessing plant in a particularly unhappy position” (Antonelli, 1972, p. 247). Indeed, the complexity of the ecological context in which EUREX operated was debated at length also inside the Nuclear Safety and Sanitary Protection Committee of CNEN in light of its potential safety implications.(CNEN, 1970a, 1970b, 1970c, 1970d).

In two decades COREN, IFEC, and especially EUREX have produced solid and liquid wastes. EUREX has discharged thousands of cubic meters of liquid containing Tritium, Strontium, Cesium, and Uranium into the Dora Baltea. Filtration and dilution techniques have reduced the concentration of released radionuclides below established safety thresholds, while high-level liquid waste that could not be discharged has been stored inside steel containers on site (Cigna et al., 1984).

In the 1970s, the problem of radioactive waste management and disposal emerged in public debates globally and Saluggia’s complex was no exception. Previous episodes of contamination among SORIN’s employees probably contributed to aliment skepticism and alarm, especially when accidental events and significant changes in the risk management approach of the nuclear sites were announced (Ballardin, 1977, Bariona, 1977a, 1977b, 1977c, 1977d). ⁸ Specifically, in 1978 a fire severely damaged the building of the partially decommissioned Avogadro reactor (see Figure 4; E. M., 1978). Despite reassurances that ‘the entire building and the storage pool had been decontaminated after the deactivation’ in 1971, the event reinforced widespread perceptions that the nuclear complex was vulnerable to safety breaches (Garbarino, 1978).

Figure 4.

Image of the damaged external structure of Avogadro Reactor, 1978.

Concerns about safety grew even bigger a few months later, when ENEL (the public electric utility who managed all Italian nuclear power plants) and SORIN proposed to use the pool of the partially decommissioned Avogadro for the storage of spent fuel elements coming from other power plants (Sani & Belelli, 1978). Saluggia’s residents split in two factions. Those who opposed the use of the pool asked the mayor to guarantee public oversight over SORIN’s and ENEL’s operations (E. M., 1979a, 1979b; N. O., 1979). After the formation of a special committee on nuclear matters inside the municipal council, on October 1979 the assembly voted in favor of the agreement that allowed ENEL to store spent fuel inside the Avogadro pool (Olivero, 1992). ⁹ While municipal representatives monitored safety standards inside Avogadro, SORIN’s management ordered the building of a reinforced concrete structure known as “the bunker” to entomb the radioactive waste resulting from the decommissioning of its experimental reactor (Agostinelli et al., 1978). In 2012, during a regular sampling campaign at the site, experts of the Regional Agency for the Protection of the Environment (ARPA, Agenzia Regionale per la Protezione Ambientale) found traces of Tritium in the groundwater and assessed that the “bunker” was the source of contamination (Camera dei Deputati, 2016). ARPA’s personnel conducted a series of remote monitoring activities to measure the levels of radiocontamination inside the structure, which cannot be inspected directly. The results excluded immediate risks for the population, but nonetheless competent authorities ordered the site owners to clean up and monitor all the structures where SORIN stored radioactive waste since the 1950s (Camera dei Deputati, 2019; Lorini, 2018a, 2018b; Regione Piemonte, 2018).

The (re)discovery of the Avogadro decommissioning legacy, thanks to the leakages of the “bunker,” is not unique to Saluggia. Nuclear sites are multilayered and multiscalar spaces of waste containment that guarantee the operability of the facilities both under normal circumstances and in times of political and economic pressure—when waste transfer options are reduced and operators are forced to manage the problem with interim storage units in situ. Trenches, pools, ponds, tanks, bunkers, and artificial hills are material remnants of decontamination and waste storage practices that respond to given regulatory allowances which are valid at the time of their implementation, but sometimes are proofs of undocumented transgressions. Thus, similarly to archeological excavations, decommissioning activities reveal almost stratigraphically the history of waste management practices on site (IAEA, 2024).

While leakages and spills of radiocontaminants occurred throughout SORIN’s operational history, the neighboring EUREX facility has attracted the attention of radioprotection agencies and Saluggia’s residents as well (De Maria, 1986a, 1986b; Tess., 1986). After the nuclear phaseout of the late 1980s, national and local representatives raised questions about the destiny of the site, considering the presence of liquid waste that could not be removed (Menicucci, 1989a, 1989b; IF, 1995; R.S., 1992). In response to this problem, in the mid-1990s a team of ENEA experts proposed to use a cold crucible melter vitrification technology already experimented on in France to solidify the high-level liquid wastes (Rolandi, 2020). Project Condizionamento Rifiuti Alta Attività (CORA) seemed a credible solution not only for the innovative solidification technique, but also because it proposed to use existing structures of the reprocessing plant instead of building new ones that would need to be dismantled in their turn (Belossi, 1997a, 1997b; Camurati, 1996, 1997; Gili, 1998). CORA did not take off, however. Franco Pozzi, who at the time oversaw the project, in an interview with the author reflects on that opportunity with some regret: “I would say that the main reason, at least the official one, is that EUREX did not have all the anti-seismic requirements of a vitrification plant and the relative temporary repository.”

In 2004, SOGIN announced that the EUREX pool containing several spent fuel elements and other reprocessing residues presented evident fissures (Schiavazzi, 2007). Leakages from the facility have been monitored through a series of extraordinary sampling campaigns due to the detection (since 2006) of groundwater contamination both inside and outside the complex (see Figure 5; ARPA Piemonte, 2020; Porzio, 2009). Although the levels of radioactivity in environmental samples were negligible from a sanitary point of view, ARPA radioecologists showed concerns for the problematic management of the sites (Camera dei Deputati, 2016). Between 2006 and 2008 an international team drained and decontaminated the pool. The elements stored underwater were extracted and enclosed in casks before being transferred to the Avogadro deposit, while the liquid waste underwent treatment before its discharge into the Dora Baltea (ARPA Piemonte, 2007; Denton et al., 2008).

Figure 5.

Map of sampling sites at Saluggia’s nuclear complex.

Containment No More: Environmental and Anthropic Risk Factors

After a period of dormancy during which the destiny of shutting down nuclear sites disappeared from the Italian public debate, the problem of decommissioning (re)emerged dramatically in Saluggia in 2000. Between October 15 and 19, extraordinary flooding events devastated large portions of Valle d’Aosta and Piedmont. At Saluggia the Dora Baltea threatened to invade the EUREX facility with potentially catastrophic consequences (De Maria, 2000a; Griseri, 2000). The flooding filled the Farini Canal, which failed to contain the impetuous water flow: A breach 80 cm wide opened through its eastern wall allowing the water to submerge some portions of the SORIN area (see Figure 6). ¹⁰ A serious situation, according to ARPA’s representatives (Camera dei Deputati, 2016).

Figure 6.

Water coming from the rupture of the Farini Canal invades the SORIN area on October 17, 2000.

A few days later, despite expert agencies detecting no immediate radiological risks, public authorities and elected representatives sounded the alarm for the potentially catastrophic consequences that similar events could have in the future (ANPA, 2001; Belossi, 2000; De Maria, 2000b; Cian, 2000). Among them, Professor Carlo Rubbia, renowned Nobel Prize physicist and interim president of ENEA, was the loudest voice: “It is my opinion that the situation is potentially at risk and that there is no time for further analyses and discussions. I ask with urgence the immediate reinforcement of the hydraulic defense of the Saluggia site” (Camera dei Deputati, 2001; Rubbia, 2001, p. 6).

Back in the 1970s, EUREX engineers had already adopted partial solutions to consolidate the hydraulic defenses of the site, like elevating liquid waste storage units on top of an artificial hill and reinforcing the west bank of the Dora Baltea (CNEN, 1978). Nonetheless, in official documents they foregrounded “internal” risk factors, such as explosions and fuel criticalities, while downplaying “external” risk factors, such as flooding events and possible inundations of the facilities. The EUREX emergency plan of 1986, for example, estimated that:

In case of an extremely intense event, the flow rate of the Dora could reach, but not go beyond, the value of 4,400 cubic meters per second. … the Dora Baltea could inundate the Saluggia Nuclear Complex, with water reaching a limit of 173 m above the sea level. (The safety apparatuses of the plants are placed above that level; ENEA, 1986, p. 14).

In the 1970s, the redaction of the preliminary safety assessment for the EUREX plant was quite controversial. Before the reprocessing plant started operating, CNEN experts discussed risk events such as the potential flooding of the Dora Baltea, but in the end the majority of them determined that the primary concern should be with the technical characteristics of the installation and considered the flooding of the Dora Baltea and other hydrographic variables as “exogenous” risk elements to be evaluated separately and at a later time (CNEN, 1970a, 1970b, 1970c, 1970d).

The 2000 flooding pushed a variety of actors to review static containment strategies that focused almost exclusively on preventing the dispersion of radiocontaminants from within the site but sidelined “external” environmental changes and the increased density of built infrastructures as potential inundation risk factors (Belossi, 2002; Licheri, 2001). According to ANPA estimates, in 2000 the waterflow of the Dora Baltea reached between 3,500 and 3,800 cubic meter per second (well below the 4,400 cubic meters indicated in the emergency plan of 1986) and yet the flooding provoked the partial inundation of the SORIN-Avogadro area (ANPA, 2001). In 2007 the Po River Public Authority (Autorità di Bacino Distrettuale del Fiume Po) declared the floodplain where the nuclear complex rests an “Area with Potential Significant Flood Risk” (APSFR) for which regional authorities programmed a series of hydraulic risk mitigation works, including the erection of another perimetral wall, this time around the SORIN-Avogadro facilities (Autorità di Bacino Distrettuale del Fiume Po, 2021).

The impossibility of transferring the radioactive waste stored inside Saluggia’s nuclear complex elsewhere creates a paradoxical situation; containment structures keep being erected to fix the permeability of a site that rests on one of the most hydrologically complex zones of Italy and that had not been designed to be a nuclear repository. Since the flooding event, responses to hydrological risk signaled a change in the understanding of containment not only as the act of preventing hazardous material from leaking outside, but also of protecting the nuclear complex from the intrusion of external environmental elements. Erecting hydraulic defense walls and new storage units is a way to restate the existence of containment borders and to reestablish a normative demarcation between inside and outside as if this provisory solution could hide a substantial failure: the waste does not go away and becomes even more visible. It is also worth noting that—according to Pozzi—in the mid-1990s the project for the solidification of high-level liquid waste did not receive authorization because the competent agencies considered the area unsuitable to host temporary waste repositories. A decade later those obstacles seemed to have been removed, despite the persistence of the environmental conditions that determined the exclusion of the vitrification solution.

The norms introduced in 2012 to streamline nuclear waste management and speed up decommissioning projects have established a legal-administrative hierarchy where decommissioning features as a top priority and, for this reason, is placed on a fast bureaucratic track to avoid delays. The new regulatory regime that, in principle, should foster a closer collaboration between SOGIN and local administrations, has produced more conflicts instead. This conflictual dynamic between decommissioning authorities and local communities is not new. The emergency decrees issued by the Berlusconi administration since the early 2000s have created frustration and distrust which cannot be easily overturned.

A Continuously Growing Site: The Ever-Shifting Horizon of Decommissioning at Saluggia

Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale (ISPRA) and other regulatory agencies have repeatedly rejected the idea that Saluggia’s nuclear complex could host the national repository, but no alternative locations have been selected yet, leaving the Saluggesi wondering whether “their” hazardous waste will ever go away (Bongioanni, 2011). “What makes me doubt that Saluggia will ever be nuclear free is that instead of dismantling the existing facilities, SOGIN keeps building new ones, including two deposits for wastes that should be moved to a safe national repository,” Gian Piero Godio, a longtime environmental activist and former EUREX employee, told me.

So far, only the IFEC plant, one of the two fuel assembly centers inside the nuclear complex, has been fully dismantled. Between 1990 and 1992 ENEA’s operating personnel decontaminated the buildings and conditioned the waste themselves, obtaining the unrestricted release of the facility (Guidotti & Sberze, 1992). “This is the first case of complete decommissioning in Italy resulting in a green field, we can do it!” a former CNEN/ENEA manager proudly told me. Later, I discovered that IFEC’s waste is still stored inside EUREX and is currently being repackaged to conform with more recent international safety standards. ¹¹ Experts’ formulas like “green field” allude to the technical capacity of cleaning up a contaminated facility and releasing the space for further nuclear or non-nuclear uses. In practice, the idea of post-nuclear “green fields” is a chimera, a metaphor that far exceeds the more modest economic intentions of nuclear power operators and site-owners, usually interested in achieving acceptable levels of decontamination that would allow them to release the site without further responsibilities (IAEA, 2011).

EUREX underwent major changes as well. In 2003, following Carlo Rubbia’s request, ENEA built a 1.3 km long reinforced concrete wall—7 to 8 m above ground and about 15 m underground—to protect the plant from the erosion and the dynamism the Dora Baltea’s waters (Figure 7; Prefettura di Vercelli, 2019). ¹² The structure unfortunately does not provide a definitive solution, as the adjacent SORIN area is still subject to potential inundations from the Farini Canal, which is what happened in 2000 (Comune di Saluggia, 2016).

Figure 7.

EUREX hydraulic defense wall along the Dora Baltea River.

Between 2004 and 2006, SOGIN’s first president Carlo Jean—a former army general—authorized the construction of a new facility called Nuovo Parco Serbatoi (NPS) for the transfer of liquid wastes (including 125 cubic meters of high-level waste) previously contained in obsolete tanks (Figure 8). The emergency provisions—General Jean acted as plenipotentiary commissar for the nuclear waste emergency appointed by Prime Minister Berlusconi—bypassed municipal and regional regulations that explicitly forbid the erection of new buildings next to the river (Legambiente Vercelli et al., 2005).

Figure 8.

Nuovo Parco Serbatoi EUREX Saluggia.

Counting on Jean’s legacy and on the support of ministerial authorizations, the Italian decommissioning company constructed one more structure for the interim storage of low-level waste denominated D2 (Figure 9). The municipal administration started a legal action against the authorizations but was defeated in court (Comune di Saluggia, 2012a). In the meantime, at the end of a long debate over the solidification of Saluggia’s liquid wastes, in 2008 SOGIN opted for the cementation approach and requested a permission to build a new plant called CEMEX, together with another deposit named “D3” whose construction started in 2013 but is still stalled after two major legal litigation interruptions (Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico, 2010, 2019).

Figure 9.

Interim storage building D2.

Aware of the urgent need to protect the nuclear complex and hopeful to see decommissioning advance with the consequent liberation of the site, in 2012 Saluggia’s administrators reluctantly accepted the expansion of the EUREX deposits on the condition that the siting of the national waste repository would start soon to allow the transfer of radioactive material. Meanwhile, in a critical report denouncing the ambiguities and the delays in SOGIN’s decommissioning plan, the special municipal committee on nuclear matters chaired by Dr. Franco Pozzi declared its opposition to the construction of the D3 edifice (Comune di Saluggia, 2012b, 2015). For this reason, Saluggia’s administration decided to not renew the committee’s mandate and hired a private consultant instead. “I guess that what we said made the administrators uncomfortable, but it is also true that right now nothing is happening and the situation is pretty much under control,” admits Pozzi.

Conclusions

Celebrated in the 1950s as an outpost of Italy’s atomic modernization, Saluggia’s complex has de facto become a waste repository. This was a process that had started already at the end of the 1970s with the transformation of the partially decommissioned Avogadro reactor into a spent fuel deposit; the process continued after the 1987 referendum and the subsequent nuclear phaseout.

The remains of two fuel fabrication plants and a reprocessing facility stand inside a water triangle formed by an alpine river and two important irrigation canals, the north stream of the major tap water wells of the Val Sesia. These unfavorable environmental conditions, which the Dora Baltea flooding in 2000 made dramatically evident, make the completion of decommissioning activites urgent; however, the absence of a national repository and the delays in the solidification process of high-level liquid waste impede the transfer of radioactive residues offsite.

During my visits to decommissioning sites, I learned that obsolete nuclear facilities do not always get dismantled progressively and steadily; instead, it is quite common that before shrinking, they grow and become temporary repositories, waiting for potential reuses and redevelopment projects that often never materialize (IAEA, 2011). As one expert told me during an external visit at the partially decommissioned ISAR 1 unit in Bayern: “Decommissioning is a logistic problem. Before attacking the most contaminated parts, you need space for moving, conditioning, and storing the waste you produce.”

Kalshoven (2023) documents how at Sellafield, England, decommissioning companies and operators choreograph selective shows of site changes to demonstrate their progress. She suggests that like the decomposing carcass of a whale sitting at the bottom of the sea, obsolete nuclear facilities continue to nurture West Cumbrian communities by providing jobs and services, and by sponsoring site redevelopment plans (Kalshoven, 2022). Contrary to overarching interpretations that tend to define West Cumbrians’ relations with the nuclear industry as one of mere dependency, local communities seem to have developed a symbiotic connection with decommissioning authorities, who keep sponsoring cultural activities that reinvigorate old and new generations’ affective ties and sense of identity with the nuclear establishment. This does not mean that there are no conflicts, but rather that being aware of their mutual benefits, both sides use frustrated expectations and misunderstandings strategically in a sort of push and pull play through which they continuously validate their social contract.

By contrast, Saluggia’s administrators, environmental activists, and residents are involved in the decommissioning governance only intermittently and some feel hostage to a never-ending process during which the site grows, instead of shrinking. The sense of identification that important sectors of the community developed through the establishment of the nuclear complex since the 1950s has largely vanished, and decommissioning has become a liability that residents can only face passively. At the same time, the Saluggesi pay less for their municipal services and get substantial tax reductions, thanks to the governmental compensation they receive for hosting the residues of their nuclear past. Most of SOGIN’s personnel do not have direct experiences with the operational history of the site and do not reside in the area, while those who knew the facilities best, like former EUREX director Franco Pozzi, have long been retired and their experience is not wanted.

To this end, I have shown that decommissioning is part and parcel of political economies of nuclear waste and should be analyzed in this broader context. Both national policies on nuclear waste management, organizational and economic strategies of decommissioning companies (private and/or public), and site-specific socioecological and historical conditions influence approaches to and outcomes of decommissioning projects. Nuclear decommissioning offers a privileged point of observation because it is a transitional phase during which local communities revisit their past relations with emplaced nuclear facilities and new socioeconomic and site reuse scenarios can potentially open up (Pasqualetti & Smardon, 2025; Sinclair & Hamilton, 2023). I argued that attending to nuclear facility biographies is an effective way to explore the links between multiple levels of governance and actors involved in nuclear waste management and to foreground the importance of changes, continuities, and even contradictions in nuclear communities’ attachments’ emerging during decommissioning processes. Given the importance of site-specific socioecological, technical, and economic characteristics of decommissioning facilities, comparative analyses of different political economic contexts and cases are particularly needed (Greco & Yamamoto, 2019). Because of its early nuclear phaseout and waste management objectives, Italy offers interesting elements to examine the implications of nuclear decommissioning, especially at a moment in which the expansion of nuclear power production is proposed as a solution to both global warming and energy security.