Italy approves nuclear law, first reactors targeted for 2033-2034

Parliament ends a four-decade closure

The Italian Senate has given final approval to the delegated bill on sustainable nuclear energy drafted by Environment and Energy Security Minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin. ANSA reported the vote on 23 September 2026, almost 40 years after the 1987 referendum that shut down the country's atomic plants. The stated purpose of the measure is to give Italy an atomic-energy statute again, one that regulates the construction and operation of power stations.

The text is enabling legislation: it authorises the government to issue implementing decrees and sets out the fields of intervention. These cover the construction and operation of plants, the management of radioactive waste and safety, the creation of supervisory bodies, and the production of hydrogen using nuclear energy. “We are already at work drafting the implementing decrees,” Pichetto said, according to ANSA. “We will do it, for certain, by the end of the year.”

Government points to the mid-2030s

Pichetto said that, “on the basis of the elements available to me from experts in the sector”, the first plants could begin operating in Italy “around 2033-2034”. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called the vote “a courageous and common-sense choice”, arguing that nuclear power “means more energy security for families and businesses, less dependence on foreign supplies and less exposure to international crises, stable low-emission energy, a concrete answer to the demand for electricity that will grow with data centres and artificial intelligence”.

Enterprises and Made in Italy Minister Adolfo Urso described the law as “an important step for the country's strategic autonomy”, and “fundamental to guaranteeing a sustainable and competitive energy mix in the coming years”, adding that “Italy returns to the future”.

Small modular reactors, not French-style units

The government does not intend to bring back large conventional stations of the kind operating in France, but small modular reactors, or SMRs. ANSA describes them as submarine engines enclosed in a steel tube, built in a factory and transported to the site.

• Factory-built units, delivered and installed in series of four or more.
• Cheaper and safer than traditional plants, according to ANSA's description.
• The most modern versions burn waste from older reactors and are cooled by liquid lead; in the event of a fault the reactor shuts down rather than exploding.
• The technology is still experimental, and manufacturers are counting on putting it on the market in the first half of the 2030s.

That schedule is central to the Italian plan: the 2033-2034 window cited by Pichetto assumes a commercial SMR offering is available by then.

Opposition and environmental groups reject the plan

Majority parliamentarians applauded the approval as a bloc, while the opposition attacked it, with the exception of Carlo Calenda's Azione, which backed the measure with what ANSA summarised as a “convinced yes”. Angelo Bonelli, a deputy for the Greens and Left Alliance (AVS), said that after four and a half years in government, “with Italy having among the highest energy costs in Europe, Meloni pulls SMRs out of the hat, a technology that today has no commercial application anywhere in the world”. He called the law “an instrument of distraction to cover the incapacity of a government that has braked renewables and favoured the big energy companies and their profits”.

Five Star Movement deputy Sergio Costa said “the sustainable nuclear they tell us about does not exist in any corner of the planet” and described the law as “an electoral campaign product”. The environmental organisations Greenpeace Italia, Legambiente, WWF Italia and Kyoto Club said nuclear power “does not solve any of the many problems Italy faces today, in the middle of the second energy crisis in the last four years”.