Italy's Senate Votes to End the Country's Nuclear Ban Almost Four Decades After Chernobyl

Italy's Senate gave final approval to legislation that opens the way for a return to nuclear power, clearing the upper house 81 to 51 with seven abstentions. Italians voted to abandon atomic energy in a referendum after the 1986 Chernobyl accident and rejected a proposed return in a second referendum in 2011.

The vote is legislative permission, not construction. Italy has no operating reactors, no current domestic supply chain for building them and no settled plan for waste. Any generation resulting from this law is years away, and the cost of capital for projects with build times measured in a decade is considerably higher now than when European governments last discussed nuclear expansion, because long-term interest rates have risen sharply.

The political context is the price of the alternative. Euronews reported that high diesel prices and refining margins have driven European oil majors up between 40 percent and 87 percent this year, a direct measure of what European consumers and industry are paying for imported energy. Italy imports most of its energy, and its manufacturers compete against firms in countries with cheaper baseload power.

A country that closed an energy option by referendum has reopened it by parliamentary vote under cost pressure. That sequence is the substance of the story, because it shows how durable an energy policy is when the bill for the alternative arrives.