Monti said the government may ultimately revert to traditional power plant designs, even though these have incurred huge cost overruns in Europe in recent years. It may also be the case, he added, that the energy source will need to be subsidized for a while.
Still, Monti said, nuclear energy was financially competitive with solar and wind energy when considering the additional infrastructure, such as batteries, needed to make renewables sufficiently reliable to power the grid.
Michele Governatori, an academic and a member of climate think tank Ecco, said he didn’t think there would ultimately be any return to nuclear, “but that doesn’t mean that it won’t cause damage.” The buzz around nuclear, he said, was allowing the government to sidestep politically unpopular decisions on how to accelerate the build-out of renewables.
He said the economics argue against fission — nuclear power is expensive and plants have to be running 24/7 for the finances to work. But given the fluctuating production levels of renewable energy, on sunny or windy days, nuclear energy might end up going unused.
The government estimates there’s a backlog of 150 gigawatts of renewable energy projects currently held up by paperwork. According to Governatori, Rome’s embrace of nuclear energy was a way of avoiding a showdown with regional governments over permitting problems, given that local authorities often hold up developments due to so-called NIMBY concerns.
There are also lobbying interests in play. “The big national champions have a bigger stake in nuclear than renewables,” said Governatori. Developers of renewable energy tend to be smaller “and are more distant from the businesses that are close to the state,” he said.