SALUGGIA. IN NUCLEAR TERRITORY Radioactivity is a perfect metaphor for how we can look at the places we live in. It exists in a way that escapes ordinary observation, present but invisible in itself. However, knowing which places are radioactive changes our perception of these places that we would otherwise look at with naive eyes. A perfect symbol of the invisible, radioactivity is by definition what cannot be photographed. Nevertheless, it is possible, although extremely complicated, to document nuclear temples and especially the territories that shelter them: nuclear power plants.
The management of the nuclear industry and the exploitation of atomic energy in Italy are topics that are largely unknown to the general public. The subject itself covers a wide range of problems: ecology, pollution, economy, town planning, society and democracy. We will see the changes inflicted on the landscape and the impossibility for people to access a certain type of territory, which has been transformed into forbidden zones. Italy was a pioneer country in nuclear research and industry. Today there are four power plants for the production of nuclear energy (shut down), four sites for nuclear research and several other sites for the temporary storage of radioactive waste. In 1987, just one year after the Chernobyl incident, Italy held a referendum. The result was the cessation of all nuclear activities. Italy is the first country in the world to have done so.
Thirty years have passed since then. Today, the total absence of industrial production from nuclear energy poses a much more complex challenge for Italy than for other countries, such as France, where waste treatment is to some extent integrated into the production cycle.
In 2011, I started a photographic research that focused on sites in northern Italy, in the regions of Piedmont and Emilia-Romagna. Trino Vercellese and Caorso, in the departments of Vercelli and Piacenza, are home to two former power stations. In Livorno Ferraris, also in Piedmont, there is one of the most imposing cathedrals in the country's desert: the Galileo Ferraris plant, which was planned as a nuclear power plant, was never able to enter the production cycle because of the referendum. And finally, Saluggia. The Eurex-Avogadro centre (Eurex for Enriched Uranium Extraction, Avogadro named after the Turin physicist and chemist Amedeo Avogadro, who died in 1856) near Turin is the most emblematic industrial site in the country. It is located a few hundred metres from the crossing of the Cavour Canal with the Dora Baltea, a tributary of the Po River, upstream of the Monferrato aqueduct which serves about a hundred municipalities.
In Saluggia, 90% of the radioactive material still present in Italy today is also stored, on a "provisional" basis for 30 years. In the meantime, Sogin, the company in charge of the management of nuclear sites in Italy, is having a hard time dismantling these sites and searching, unsuccessfully so far, for a place to store the waste permanently. This is a point which indissolubly links Italy and France. Paris is waiting for its neighbour to build its own storage site before sending back tens of tonnes of treated waste to La Hague.
My photographic and journalistic research on nuclear power plants, still in progress, would not have been possible without Sogin's collaboration. I would particularly like to thank Marco Sabatini.