ABSTRACT: In industrialised and nuclear Europe, there is only one exception: Italy. Even without nuclear power stations, this country is the fifth largest industrial power in the world today. How could this have happened? In Italy the Radical Party existed; but this was not enough. The nuclear risk knows no bounds. The fight to give a different direction to development and energy-saving, must be transnational.

("Single issue" booklet for the XXXV Congress of The Radical Party - Budapest 22-26 april 1989)

If we take a quick look at the map of nuclear Europe, there is one exception which immediately meets the eye: Italy.

France and Russia are respectively at the top of the grim list of nuclear power stations, with 43 plants in use in the first and 40 in use in the second. Of the remaining 82 in use throughout Europe subdivided among Spain, East and West Germany, Belgium and England only three were built by Italy, and at present these are all out of use. Italy ranks sixth or seventh among industrialised nations, and in spite of this, it is a country which has not made the "all" nuclear option which involved and seduced the whole of Europe in the decade between 1970 and 1980.

Italy is besides, the only industrialised country in Europe where "non" nuclear is already a reality which has not imposed a halt on the nation's development. If someone asks how this could have occurred, the answer is simple: in Italy, there is the Radical Party.

The Radicals who opposed the nuclear option before the Chernobyl disaster were described by scientists and experts as well as politicians, as "incompetent, hysterical opponents of progress and (why not?) of the working class; irrational and stupid"...and worse! In 1980, when the Radical Party collected the first signatures in Italy for a referendum against the nuclear energy plants, the "lay parties" and the "illuminists" denounced this as scandalous.

This nuclear culture, more than ever nationalist and chauvinist, filled the hearts of those who maintained they had found the answer to all energy problems by building an adequate number of plants; inexorable sources of all light and well-being, nuclear energy was the reply to a society which is not afraid of progress and does not fear "impossible explosions", but on the contrary, is responsible and intransigent when faced with the irrational neurosis of whoever might wish to return to the "age of candle light". This concept of a world "lit" by nuclear energy progressed in Europe to become widespread in the decade between 1970 and 1980, while America had already ceased to commission new plants; it had suspended the construction of nuclear energy plants nearing completion the so-called white elephants and was selling the rest to Europe which, in turn, hastened to make Pharaonic projects and to plan the installation of hundreds of nuclear energy plants. In particular, France, Germany and Italy co-operated to

finance equal shares of the project for new alchemists and necromancers of nuclear self-generating reactors. "Superphenix", which, besides being eternal, would have transformed uranium into plutonium...if this machine had functioned in one instance and this was not to be so since it broke down a few months after the installation the first to be happy would have been the military in particular, because plutonium is the basic element necessary for the fabrication of atomic bombs. The "Superphenix" would have put an end to the differences between nuclear energy for peace and civilian purposes, and nuclear energy for military use, which have always been divided by a somewhat hazy line, and which finally it would be perfectly possible to combine. There would have been the omnipotent delirium of the "force de frappe" and the mingling of the highest technology with militarised society.

In the conflict between the antinuclear faction and the Goliath of the electricity companies (owned privately, by the State and by the big industrial multinationals) the Radical David played a decisive role for Italy before Chernobyl, and afterwards for Europe. And in fact, on November 7 and 8, 1987, a year before the explosion, Italians rushed to vote for or against nuclear power, in a referendum organised by the Radical Party and by the environmentalist and green forces whose existence and presence in the institutions the Radicals had fervently wanted to promote a few years earlier as the new hope for the country. The result of the first popular consultation held in Europe on an argument considered taboo by public opinion and citizens' common sense, was a plebiscite against nuclear power.

But the most important thing of all, is that the debate which took place on the nuclear option should not be based on irrational fear nor "day after" hysterics. The Radicals, figures in hand, revealed the only thing that the pronuclear lobby had never permitted to come out into the open: nuclear energy is very inconvenient, it is prohibitively expensive and makes very little profit. Going through the accounts of ENEL, the Italian electricity board, rattling off the list of the wasted billions, in Italy and elsewhere, using the treaty on Euratom is out for a unidirectional research with no future, the truth that emerges is that the "all" nuclear, before the year 2000, can cover only 10% of world energy requirements. The great scientific dogma according to which a single source of energy for all the requirements of the planet was sufficient, belied by years of nuclear oriented energy policies, while it appears more and more obvious that the problem is that of the preservation and the appropriate multipl

e use of the various energy resources.

What ecology dictates, as a new and necessary economy, is getting through to everybody. The Italian vote of November 8 and 9, gave Europe clear answers, because it sanctioned one of the industrialised countries to withdraw from a nuclear research programme, and from the "Superphenix" project, opening a debate on nuclear waste and on the uselessness of the risk to which humanity is subjected. It was the end of a myth and the start of new reflection. The Radicals are its artefacts.