Italy neither has the engineers to build a nuclear power plant, they would have to ask another nation, like Russia, Canada or France, to build it for them.
And where does the nuclear fuel come from? Russia.
> And where does the nuclear fuel come from? Russia.
Not true at all. Russia is producing 5% of the world Uranium, and they probably use quite a lot of that domestically given they produce 8% of all nuclear power in the world with their own plant.
Kazakhstan + Uzbekistan is 50% of the word production. Canada is second and will be happy to start selling to the EU. Namibia and Australia both produce twice as much as Russia.
Not to say that supply of natural Uranium is not a concern because you do depends of a small list of countries but we don't need to buy any from Russia.
> The following countries are known to operate enrichment facilities: Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Before uranium enrichment comes conversion to Uranium Hexafluoride. For instance the German uranium enrichment facility (biggest one in Europe) gets Uranium Hexafluoride from Russia.
Also a list of countries operating enrichment facilities does not say anything about capacity (Russia 50%) or market share (Russia 44%).
The reality is that both the US and Europe are dependent on Russian uranium services, with the biggest dependency in Eastern Europe for fuel rods for Soviet-style Reactors. It's slowly changing, but will probably take decades.
So? Refinement doesn't have a dependency on a particular location. This is like saying nuclear energy in Germany is dependent on France and other countries. Currently it is but only because we choose to not do it locally - it doesn't have to be this way.
You know refinement can be done anywhere? We take bauxite and ship it to the other side of the world to make aluminium because electric power is cheaper there.
I would classify ITER as basic research instead of a commercial nuclear power plant.
I didn't know that Enel operates nuclear power plants, that's interesting, but they seem to come from an acquisition of Endesa and have been constructed way before that acquisition, and from designs of foreign places. So they aren't modern generation reactors that one would want to build from scratch.
As for the Slovakian nuclear power plant, it's a russian design as well.
I don't doubt that Enel could operate nuclear reactors of foreign design, where Canada, Russia and France have strong capabilities, but if the design comes from a different country, do you really achieve the independence goal?
> I would classify ITER as basic research instead of a commercial nuclear power plant.
Absolutely correct. It will never serve as a power plant. It's a giant experiment, that's what the E stands for. We should be so lucky that one day it will generate a few minutes of power :)
Canada, Khazakhstan, Namibi, and so on. Russia is pretty far down the list. Australia has the largest known reserves of uranium they just haven pushed to extensively extract it.
> Canada, Khazakhstan, Namibi, and so on. Russia is pretty far down the list.
Not wrong, but Russia controls about half of the world's enrichment capacity.
If you want to avoid possible lock-in, then you may want to look at reactors that do not need enriched uranium (like CANDU: it does have an extra up-front cost for 'heavy water' though).
> The following countries are known to operate enrichment facilities: Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
What are those engineers doing currently, then? It takes time to actually build a technology base for somethin like nuclear, and it generally requires that you are building and running nuclear power plants.
And even after years of the war in Ukraine, Russia is still the second largest source of uranium for the EU, making up a quarter of imports
Italian companies that work on reactor design, decommissioning and technology commissioned by foreign countries, for example.
>Russia is still the second largest source of uranium for the EU, making up a quarter of imports
The vast majority of contracts are multiannual, the EU will rely much less on Russian uranium export once they expire. Italy has no reason to sign them with Russia.
And where does the nuclear fuel come from? Russia.