ABSTRACT: A referendum against fast plutonium reactors was proposed by the Amici della Terra [Friends of the Earth] in a debate held in Rome on May 31. The initiative intends to strike at the European policy that hinges on the Super-Phénix-1, the first big fast reactor built internationally on French initiative with substantial Italian participation. It is, in fact, a matter of obliging the withdrawal from this participation by abrogating an eleven-year-old law made expressly for allowing ENEL [the state electrical company, ed.] to participate in foreign companies for the construction of nuclear plants (law no. 856 of December 18, 1983).

The proposal will be submitted to all movements, associations and parties with the intention of creating the widest possible front. It will be a point of departure for re-launching the anti-nuclear campaign in Europe. Just as during the period between the two wars, in the Twenties and Thirties, there triumphed again in Europe the arms merchants and producers, business and corporations, heedless of their international responsibilities towards themselves and the world and uninterested in the values of liberty, but only concerned with mediocre reasons of state.

(NOTIZIE RADICALI No. 66, March 14, 1984)

Plutonium is the wildest fairy-tale of the civilian nuclear imagination: it is its inevitable outcome. Resources have already been spent on it which are three times more than have been spent for working out conventional reactors. But the development of this technology has taken directions which are not those of the market. It has been an affair of state and of states. It is no accident if it had to depend upon the wrestling match which saw the United States lose to its European competitors in the Seventies and the growth of that technocratic nationalism which, from France, has spilled out across Europe.

Those who are used to considering the United States merely as a "butcher" will give no weight to the economic reasons (optimising the return of the great investments made in conventional reactors) or the political ones (the risks of proliferation) which induced them to fight against any immediate prospects of widespread fast reactors. Not even the European nuclearists paid any attention to these reasons. And so today the French technocracy is imposing its choices on Europe and, along with it, the irresistible temptation of a new and more ruinous Concorde.

Without extra-economic support, interests and objectives, the technology of the fast reactors would have never been able to overcome the difficulties: the high costs which make them uncompetitive; the safety problems which have still not been satisfactorily resolved; the difficulty of re-treating on a vast scale the irradiated fuel which put off the prospects of penetration well beyond a politically assessable time span. And lastly, the clashes with the military sector which make it the most slippery factor with regard to nuclear proliferation in the West as well as in the Third World. But it should not be taken for granted that political interests are enough to impose the breeding system on the market.

In fact, if the costs and risks are multiplied in comparison to conventional reactors, the prospects are not necessarily more fruitful. Not even with the faster reactors can nuclear energy hope to exceed the marginal role it plays in the world's energy consumption. The size of the present nuclear programmes, fixed by the difficulties and defeats of the Seventies, rigidly mark the limits of future prospects too.

The nuclear dream has been clearly cut down to size by the impact with reality, and now that the myth of plutonium has been exploded, it is clear just how intrinsically modest even while reckless it is even in its most ambitious strategic prospects. In fact, the two pillars have collapsed on which the development of the fast reactors rested: the need for them and their competitiveness. The former, based on the fear of a fast depletion of uranium reserves, has been contradicted by the facts. And the latter could only be supported at the price of seriously forcing economic logic, at the cost of imposing the heaviest financial burdens and political bonds on the collectivity and of going against the interests of the nuclear industry itself. No reasons of state can make such irrational choices acceptable. No technology, as Dominique Finon says, can long endure without a solid economic basis.

Not only are the advantages non-existent, but there are certain political risks. First of all there is the danger of the proliferation of atomic arms. The problem should be considered realistically and globally, taking into account both the technical and the political aspects. Technically it is certain that countries would have simpler ways of getting themselves atom bombs. But it is equally certain that the acquisition of plants and technology for civilian use would be politically the surest, least painful and thus the easiest way of getting oneself a nuclear arsenal at the opportune moment. It cannot be denied that the commercialisation of fast reactors would multiply the points of contact between civilian and military use of the atom. One knows that there is no really effective international control system. One also knows that the effects on civil and political liberty should not be underestimated that the control of the movement of large quantities of plutonium would have.

Anyone denying these problems is working for serious disinformation and trying to disguise reality. It would be enough to recall the Israeli bombardment of Iraq's Tamuz reactor in June 1981, to show how serious nations - not the anti-nuclearists - take assurances about peaceful atoms. What then of the official position taken by France on the Super-Phénix's use of plutonium in the French atomic arsenal?