Here’s an interesting combination of thoughts. The Scotsman reports that Italy has abandoned its anti-nuclear power stance:
ITALY, which last week decided to embrace nuclear power two decades after a public referendum banned nuclear power and deactivated all its reactors, could be just the first of several European countries to reverse its stance on nuclear power, a leading industry group has said.
Ian Hore-Lacey, spokesman for the London-based World Nuclear Association, said: “Italy has had the most dramatic, the most public turnaround, but the sentiments against nuclear are reversing very quickly all across Europe.”
and Sideways Mencken, posting from his new digs in Tuscany, notes the dismal energy situation in Italy:
We’ve been warned by everyone that electricity here is terribly expensive. Our landlord explained that all the juice in Italy comes from French nuclear power plants. This is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but the ethos here is very parsimonious when it comes to power. Low-wattage bulbs, lights on timers, lights on motion-sensors, everything conspires to turn lights off and leave you groping in the dark.
This duplex we live in has 4 kilowatts available for the two families. (At least, I think it’s kilowatts.) So we cannot all run appliances at the same time. The landlady runs her dishwasher and washing machine in the morning, we run ours after noon. Neither of us has a clothes drier. We were told that no one in Italy has a drier because it’s, again, so expensive, all that French electricity. We assumed that was just the landlords explaining away their refusal to provide a drier but no, a visit to the local big box store reveals a ratio of about 20 to 1, washers to driers.
So we go around in the dark wearing damp, wrinkled clothing.
I was born and raised in Italy and I can tell that there’s a bit of exaggeration in that blogspost. I never had to wander around in the dark because energy is too expensive, and the lack of dryers is more a cultural than economic thing. Likewise, sometimes water is in short supply because some areas are prone to draught.
However, it is true that our energy situation is dire and we import a lot from France. Nuclear seems the only way to go.
Fabio:
A deliberate exaggeration, of course. We do have light. Just not every light at once, like we had when living in the states.