After banning nuclear power for two decades, Italy has announced plans to build a new wave of nuclear plants. Concerns about oil prices, energy security, and fossil-fuel emissions contributed to the about-face by the world’s largest net importer of electricity. “Only nuclear plants safely produce energy on a vast scale with competitive costs, respecting the environment,” the country’s minister of economic development said Thursday. But the switcharoo won’t solve any short-term problems: the government may need legal action to turn over the popular public referendum that closed the country’s nuclear plants in 1987, and new plants take about 20 years to build. Italy also needs to figure out how to deal with its existing radioactive waste (provided pawning it off on the U.S. doesn’t work out). And the government should prepare for pushback: the nuclear-power plan is, says the director of Greenpeace Italy, “a declaration of war.”
