By Marco Pannella

ABSTRACT: The Radicals against the nuclear power plants that are supposed to represent the advent of Utopia, but in reality represent totally entrusting our lives to the fraudulently bankrupt who have already dilapidated and in great part destroyed the not only "what we have, but what we are". In the name of nuclear power, as Italia Nostra (1) declares, ENEL (2) is closing down five hundred hydroelectric plants.

("IL GIORNALE", January 5, 1978)

(The Radical Party has taken the most violent position against nuclear power of all the political parties. Here we give space to the viewpoint of the PR's leader, Marco Pannella.)

I know that I do not know. This too is a form of knowledge. And since this profession of ignorance or uncertainty is not due to lack of interest or of efforts to know, I have the right to defend it and say to the gentlemen of the government and their scientists that their certainty seems to me to be very weak and dangerous. I have the right to ask for or to take, for myself and my children, the time necessary and the available information to form an opinion and, if possible, a conviction. I also have the duty to declare, as a representative of the country (and not of my party comrades and my electors), that in the face of the economic, social, and scientific disasters into which we have been cast by the system's and the regime's economists, scientists and politicians, that they too must beware of their bosses, public or private, of the ENEL and the CNEN (3), of the information, the programming, the management of our Italian energy policy and applied science.

I once had an uncle in Abruzzo who fought for years against the predecessors of ENEL to continue producing his own energy to see at night, to warm himself in winter, to cultivate his fields, to run his oil presses, mills, workshops. He used the water from the streams on his land and sent it back clean to the river where we went to bathe. The wind in his windmill was useful to him too; it helped him on the not infrequent days of the year when there was not much water. Uncle Igino Parere was no great inventor, but he knew how to make the most of his wits by holding an intense dialogue with nature, which he loved. He was obstinate, as am I. He mistrusted the state and so they thought - or said - that he was reactionary. In the end he lost, because he was a free man, but all alone. He lost because the reigning powers and its laws did not have a social and productive alternative, organised and explicit, against them, but only the intelligence and wit of one man, one man only. Thousands and thousands of singl

e men like him have added up to a losing sum, not a winning project. We are paying for their having lost.

Today free science (poor and unapplied as it is for egoistic and class interests) is trying to prove Uncle Igino right. The nuclear Utopia fed with enriched uranium and self-regenerating plutonium, ought to be our road to Damascus where we should be blinded by the gold which is promised us and entrust our economic and ecological salvation, our very lives, to the fraudulently bankrupt who are destroying, and already have in large part, not only "what we have, but what we are". I know that the choice they are offering us is irreversible. I know that they have tried to impose it on us unawares, like thieves or assassins. I know that if our four Radical deputies had not given the cry of alarm ten months ago, all the political forces, all of them - all of them - from Democrazia Proletaria (except for LC [Lotta Continua]) (4) to the MSI [neo-Fascists] by way of the PCI-DC-PSI [Communists, Christian Democrats, and Socialists respectively] would have pretended not to see, not to hear, not to know.

I also know that the choice of enriched uranium will not lessen our energy dependence but multiply it without essentially changing it. I know that if the ENEL's estimates of our energy needs should remain what it is (whereas it depends on us), the energy "black hole" will only be filled to a ridiculously small degree. I know that Amory Lovins, who knows about such things, estimates the "real cost" of a nuclear plant varies between 30,500 - 40,000 billion, not between the 600 - 1,500 billion that it is said to cost. I know that the safety problems have not been solved at all, and that those who tend to underestimate the danger do so at the cost of a preliminary safety organisation that in itself would be worse than any political catastrophe that we have been used to. ENEL itself is the foremost cause of our lack of energy and production and social crisis: "Italia Nostra" accuses it of having closed about five hundred hydroelectric plants corresponding to the same number of water basins in the peninsula.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Italia Nostra is an organisation protecting the Italy's natural and artistic heritage.

2) ENEL - The state-owned electric power company.

3) CNEN - National Centre for Nuclear Energy which has since been changed to include alternative energy of other kinds, calling itself now CENEA.

4) Democrazia Proletaria and Lotta Continua are two far-left parties.