“Atomi in risaia”: Conflicts over Water Resources in the Italian Nuclear Program

The chapter examines the debates and conflicts that accompanied the plan to build a nuclear plant in Northern Italy, along the Po river, between the second half of the 1970s and the mid-1980s. Drawing on corporate, government, and local sources, newspaper articles, and personal interviews, the chapter shows that the controversies that haunted the project first and foremost revolved around the availability of water resources. The Po river was already intensely used by both industry and agriculture. As a result, ENEL’s nuclear technicians and engineers found themselves in fierce competition with others for water as a precious resource. Rice growers were particularly worried, fearing that the nuclear power plant would ruin the rice fields through water withdrawal, thermal pollution, radioactive contamination, and local climate change.