Tuscia says NO to nuclear waste dump

The population of a rural area north of Rome is protesting against plans to install a nuclear waste dump there.

Residents argue that Tuscia, once dominated by the Etruscans, was one of Italy’s first farming areas to turn to organic farming.

Sogin, the publicly-owned responsible for decommissioning Italy’s nuclear plants and managing radioactive waste, has already revealed that it considers Tuscia’s geology “as particularly suitable” for the future repository. It is also disturbingly near the centuries-old oaks and archaeological remains of the Pian Sant’Angelo nature reserve.

Tuscia is one of 51 locations which the government identified as suitable sites for the €900 million deposit that will take four years to build.

Two thousand people from 60 Tuscia towns and villages organised a protest march in February, declaring their opposition to the project and making clear that they would continue to fight it.

“There’s a 50 per cent chance that it will be built in Tuscia, even though we have been promoting organic agriculture for years. We are determined to oppose it,” Danilo Piersanti, mayor of the Tuscia village of Gallese, declared to the La Repubblica newspaper.

Sogin’s apparent preference for Tuscia was “a very strange choice”, William Urquhart, a British conservationist who owns an organic farm in the area, said.

“Farms around here produce organic olive oil, honey and hazelnuts. The dump has to be put somewhere, but locating it here seems really odd,” Urquhart told the Telegraph.

He also expressed doubts about Tuscia’s geological suitability.

“The last time there was a big earthquake in central Italy, in 2016, massive cracks appeared in the walls of our house,” he said, pointing out that a leak in the future plant could contaminate the region’s volcanic lakes.

Puglia in southern Italy and Piedmont, on the French border in the north are also in the running for the 150-hectare deposit which will store waste from decommissioned power plants as well as the radioactive material produced by industry, hospitals and research centres.