Nuclear power: again?

Nuclear Power? No, thank you. In the past weeks the italian government has, with a coup-de-main, cancelled what the popular will had decreed through a referendum in 1987 and decided to restart the production of electric power with the use of nuclear plants and has made agreements along these lines with France, so as to buy from them the technologies needed  to build the needed infrastructures.
The reason given to justify the decision has been the need to reduce the energetic dependence of Italy from foreign sources.
As people on a spiritual path that sees in the Nature around us the Divine, and that therefore deel it their own duty to work to defend said Nature, we think it is important to remind everyone a couple of simple facts so that anyone can form his own informed opinion about the matter and then decide indipendently if this choice has to be approved or, as we think, if it is the case to return to use the referendum to stop a wicked decision. Let's begin from the start:

  1. Getting back to nuclear plants will not reduce Italy's dependence from foreign imports as far as energetic sources are involve. Just as we do not produce oil, in fact, we do not produce uranium either, nor any other nuclear fuel in any significant amount; it is therefore obvious that we will have to buy this fuel from abroad, just like we now buy oil or natural gas. With an aggravating circumstance of no small amount: if it is true that the world reserves of oil are slowly getting exhausted, it's even more true, though less well known, that there is even less uranium. It has been calculated that, at the present rate of consumption, the existing reserves will be completely depleted within the next fifty years: it this rate was to increase somehow, which is likely, this time could reduce up to some ten years. Given the time needed to build a nuclear power plant (whose blueprints we will buy from abroad, just to remain on the subject of energetic independence), there is a real risk of finding that there is no more fuel available once the plant should be complete and ready to start production. This is the logical consequence of keeping to use sources that are not renewable.
  2. Nuclear power is the most expensive to produce: there is not only the cost of the fuel needed, in fact, but also the costs to design, build and mantain the plants are sky high (and this is the reason why french could not wait to sell us the blueprints of their plants, otherwise they would never cover the costs of building said plants), and there are the costs of disposing the waste derived from the process. These costs will inevitably fall on the citizens, as price rises on their energy bills and new taxes to finance the building of the new plants (which are infact part of what is written inside the agreement the government has signed with France).
  3. Just to remain on the matter of the waste, no country in the world has, so far, still devised a safe system to dispose of said wastes, not even countries that have been using this form of energy for a long time. We are talking of wastes that remain lethally radioactive for some tens of thousands of years: in a country whose governments have so far proved themselves, due to a lack of political will, absolutely inept to correctly manage even the regular urban wastes, the prospect of having them dealing with radioactive wastes is enough to scare even the most optimistic of us.
  4. In spite of the many statements on the subject, there is no such a thing as  a safe nuclear power: even in the countries hosting the most modern and advanced plants there are tens of incidents every year, and we get to know only a small part of those. We cannot evaluate accurately the impact that these continuos stream of nuclear accidents will have on the environment and on the population because too little research has been done about it, given the obvious opposition of government against it. We hear costantly talking about fourth generation plants as those who will give us a safe nuclear power. What we are not told, though, is that these plants do not exist to begin with, and they won't exist at least for ten more years because they are still being imagined. Moreover just the past week a study, published in Great Britain by the Independent, showed that it is true that these plants will have more control systems to prevents accidents, but it is even truer that, given the nature of the technology that will be used, for the way the nuclear fuel will be modified, in case of an accident these pants would be way more dangerous than the present ones, with a radioactive contamination calculated as four times more that of Chernobyl.

Given the reasons outlined above we personally think that the decision of returning to a source that is not only obsolescent but also gradually on the way to be exhausted is incomprehensible: it is not by chance that the USA have not been building any nuclear plant in the last thirty years, and that the other industrilized countries are moving along the same lines. Just when everyone around the world is working on clean, renewable energies we get back to nuclear power, cancelling the result of a referendum: in the USA President Obama has just allocated the highest amount of money ever given byt the american administration to the research on clean energy sources; Germany has created over a million new working places by investing on solar powerm and has become leader in Europe as far as this technology is involved. We are the "country of sun", yet we use neither solar power, which we have in abundance, nor the wind or geothermic power, which we have in large amounts as well. Again in Germany, a country where the climate is far colder than ours, they are designing and realizing passive houses, ie houses that are built in such a way that they do not need heating of any kind: these are, in our opinion, the lines that should be followed if we really wanted to reduce our energetic dependence from foreign imports, and at the same time we would have a cleaner country and a cleaner planet.
Returning to nuclear power is a huge step back made only for the economic interests of few and against the interest of the country and its citizens, and also against the good of the planet and our own health