In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, Italians voted on nuclear power, believing they had defeated the devil.

Now, with all those oil tankers blocked in the Strait of Hormuz, nuclear energy is finally back on the agenda. But forty years ago, following the Chernobyl disaster, nuclear power had become the devil incarnate in Italy. Thirty-nine years ago, with the referendum on nuclear power, we became a nation of exorcists and banished the devil. With the consequences we are all too familiar with.

A series of traumatic events in everyday life filled us with fear. But how could it be that, from one day to the next, we had to avoid ‘killer lettuce’ like the plague? No, it was unbearable. And fresh milk being withheld from children because the cows might have grazed on contaminated grass? That really was a shock. Even tap water was deemed unsafe, prompting television news programmes to broadcast images of shoppers rushing to supermarkets to stockpile crates of mineral water. In 1986, the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, more than two thousand kilometres from Italy’s eastern border, threw the country into a state of panic. The disaster dominated conversations and concerns across the country. Milk, lettuce leaves and drinking water suddenly appeared as adversaries slipping into kitchens, onto plates and into school canteens. It was against this backdrop of apprehension that Italians were called upon to decide on the future of nuclear power. Had the referendum been held a few years earlier, the outcome would have been uncertain. In the wake of the Chernobyl panic, the electorate decided that nuclear power stations should be shut down. Or rather, no. That Italy could still source nuclear energy – paying a hefty price for the service – from French nuclear power stations, the nearest of which, the Bugey plant on the River Rhône, lay just over a hundred kilometres from Italy’s western border – 1,900 kilometres closer than Chernobyl – and had recorded zero accidents from 1987 to the present day. With the nuclear power stations across the Alps (in Paris they did not give in to panic), which from then until the present day have covered almost 65 per cent of France’s energy needs.

If there is one symbolic date on which it is legitimate and historically sound to say that Italian populism was born, it is 8 and 9 November 1987, when opponents of nuclear power won the referendum by a landslide, with 80 per cent voting against and a meagre, dismal and silent 20 per cent in favour. Incidentally, on those very same two days, a repeal referendum was also held on the civil liability of judges; this too was won by a landslide, riding the wave of the well-documented judicial persecution of Enzo Tortora, with almost 80 per cent of the vote, but was then, unfortunately, ignored, undermined or even almost completely overturned in the legislative process. The referendum on nuclear power, however, was not ignored: it became the mother of all bans and all anathemas. Public attention (obsession) was entirely riveted on nuclear power. And in the pre-social media era, in pubs, on the underground, in mechanics’ workshops and in the (presumptuous) newsrooms of newspapers, people pretended – without really knowing anything – to be familiar with every detail about ‘radioactive isotopes’, on the potency of caesium-137, capable of disrupting the food chain, and of iodine-131, carried by the radioactive cloud – heedless of borders – on the back of heavy rainfall which, it was asserted with peremptory certainty in bars both in the city centre and on the outskirts, would deposit the contaminant on the ground. Nor did the secretive and downplaying attitude of the Soviets help the transparency of public debate; they carefully concealed the extent of the material damage, but above all the human toll, of the Chernobyl disaster, caused by a power station built using antiquated and obsolete technology. In this heated climate, fraught with collective anxiety, it was the first time that the people’s verdict, as expressed at the ballot box, was sought and emphatically demanded on a complex technical and scientific issue. It was as if, during the Covid pandemic, at the height of the emergency, with intensive care units overflowing and convoys of coffins being transported by military lorries to Bergamo, the population had been asked in a referendum—with a binding result—whether mass vaccination should be permitted or prohibited, and above all whether it should be with Pfizer or AstraZeneca, mRNA or non-mRNA.

No one knew anything, but everyone had to decide on the country’s energy future with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. A plebiscite, and indeed everyone fell into line, except for the minority factions of the Republican and Liberal parties. The Socialists, spurred on in particular by Claudio Martelli, willingly fell in behind the vox populi, which was also, inevitably, making itself heard through large street demonstrations, brightened by the symbol of the laughing sun yet filled with anxieties and concerns. The Christian Democrats—especially after two crushing referendum defeats on divorce and abortion—went through all sorts of contortions and let the people rage as they decided their own fate. The Communists, historically more closely tied to the culture of the factory, labour and industry, offered no resistance. The literary and artistic world, as usual, sounded the clarion call of revolution. One of the season’s best-selling books was Inverno nucleare by Alberto Moravia, which was actually dedicated to the possible atomic apocalypse of the major military powers, but which, with that title, was interpreted as the passionate denunciation of a great writer deeply shaken by the Chernobyl disaster. It was a climate that brooked no distinctions or nuances. Nor did it tolerate expertise backed by university degrees and professorships. A prestigious physicist such as Edoardo Amaldi – one of the ‘Via Panisperna boys’, one of Enrico Fermi’s closest friends, and an illustrious figure in Italian science – was treated as a militant, anti-scientific conscientious objector. Yet his views on nuclear energy were not even heard, because in the referendum-fuelled populism surrounding science and technology, it had been tacitly and unanimously decided that my very personal and utterly uninformed vote – taken in complete ignorance of science and technological applications – should be placed on exactly the same footing as that of a great scientist. ‘One person, one vote’: does that ring a bell? That is to say, not a referendum on values, on an electoral law, on a political or civil issue, on major ethical choices, or on matters concerning the organisation of a community. In such cases, as in elections, equality is a cornerstone of democracy. But science is not democratic, they say. And yet, during a television debate, Amaldi remarked that one of the leading figures in the anti-nuclear campaign – a former student of his from the Faculty of Physics – had ‘always been an idiot’, but his words were met with moral condemnation and, above all, interpreted as a display of intellectual arrogance that sought to turn science into something beyond democratic debate – a sign of insensitivity towards the plight of families deprived of the basic comfort of an uncontaminated salad.

Before Chernobyl, the issue of nuclear power did not arouse strong passions. There were badges, stickers and T-shirts bearing the slogan ‘nuclear power, no thanks’, but the Green movement – then also known as the ecologists – remained on the fringes of public perception. It is also true that towards the end of the 1970s, Massimo Scalia and Gianni Mattioli – who, after a long and intense period of activism within the post-1968 far left, would go on to become leading figures in the Green movement (“they’re like watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside”, as their most bitter detractors would say with ill-concealed counter-ideological ferocity) – were already writing (the quote is taken from Il pezzo mancante by Chicco Testa and Giuseppe Zollino, published by Il Mulino): ‘The choice of nuclear power appears to be the culmination of an entire historical phase in the energy policy of capitalist countries, consistent with the logic underpinning the concept of development in these countries and, as such, integral to the capitalist mode of production which it helps to perpetuate – on the one hand by revolutionising its technologies, and on the other by accentuating its distortions’. “For this reason,” Mattioli and Scalia concluded, “the nuclear choice should not be considered in isolation, but within the context of national and international class relations. A choice imposed by imperialism.” Yet the exact opposite had actually happened, because in Italy and throughout the world the nuclear option had only really taken hold as a mandatory energy source around the mid-1970s. And right in the midst of it all – then, just as now – was the oil crisis that seemed set to knock out the advanced economies and the very lifestyles of consumption, punished by the grim ‘austerity Sundays’ when citizens compensated for the anxiety of deprivation and the endless queues for petrol by rediscovering the bicycle in the city, much like the Italians confined to their homes during the lockdown, when they sang the national anthem from their balconies through their tears (‘we’ll come out of this better off’: as we’ve seen). Hence the decision to build four nuclear power stations in Italy: at Trino Vercellese in Piedmont, at Caorso, at Borgo San Sabotino near Latina – in the area where fascism had celebrated the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes – and at Garigliano, in the municipality of Sessa Aurunca in Campania, and to plan another at Montalto di Castro. The oil crisis accelerated a shift (so much for a ‘capitalist’ and ‘imperialist’ project) away from the traditional mistrust of nuclear power which, in Italy in the mid-1960s, had led to the political and judicial lynching of Felice Ippolito, president of the CNEN (acronym for the National Committee for Nuclear Energy), who was attacked from all sides—so much so that the offensive against him had even been launched by the moderate Giuseppe Saragat—and was defended by no economic force, nor even by the silent and secretive scientific community. He was not defended by any political force, perhaps with the partial exception of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Within the PCI, the distinction was very clear between military nuclear power—opposed by the large and solemn demonstrations of the ‘Partisans for Peace’—and the nuclear power needed to supply energy to industry: after all, the Chernobyl plant was very much a product of that history and that distinction. Could the PCI really have viewed with suspicion decisions that had been taken in the great Soviet Union, where socialism was being realised and where Sputnik had been launched?

There was even "Il Pioniere", the comic newspaper for children and young people which, in the 1950s, in the shadow of Stalin, sought to be the communist and internationalist response to "Corriere dei Piccoli", proudly showcasing the exploits of a likeable and kind character, Atomino, capable of fighting with great daring for the peaceful use of the atom against the warmongering forces of capitalism and imperialism. Atomino was not opposed to nuclear power, nor was the industrialist spirit of the Italian Communist Party (“Soviet-style electrification”), which, however, in the 1987 referendum was forced to beat a retreat in the face of a powerful populist advance determined to prevent Italy from becoming a new, gigantic Chernobyl.

Nuclear power came to be viewed as inherently problematic after the release of the film starring Jane Fonda, "The China Syndrome", which brought international attention to the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island power station in Pennsylvania, where a core meltdown had threatened to trigger a catastrophe. Activist cinema had provided the impetus. On the Aurelia road, more or less along the same stretch where, a few years later, a religious re-enactment would be held to prevent the construction of the motorway intended to run alongside the lands of Calabisi, processions and roadblocks formed, involving cars and even tractors, to prevent the Montalto di Castro power station from coming on stream – a town later made famous by a beautiful film by Paolo Virzì, Caterina va in città. But the tension would not have reached its peak without the emotional rift caused by the Chernobyl disaster. The referendum put an end to Italy’s nuclear energy programme. Traces of that end can be seen on our energy bills, which show payments for electricity produced in France, a hundred kilometres away, and imported by us as if nothing had happened, ignoring the glaring contradiction. Meanwhile, across the world, for almost forty years, there have been no further accidents at nuclear power stations, with the exception of the Japanese plant at Fukushima (which was actually the result of a tsunami) – an incident that prompted Angela Merkel to order the ill-advised closure of Germany’s nuclear power stations. Now Italy is belatedly trying to take remedial action. On the other hand, thanks to anti-scientific populism, we have paid a very heavy price. But the lettuce is safe.