Italy, UK Nuclear Agencies Partner on Graphite Reactor Decommissioning

Italy’s Sogin and Britain’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority have signed a five-year agreement aimed at one of nuclear power’s hardest back-end jobs: decommissioning graphite-moderated reactors. The memorandum, signed in London on May 5 by Sogin chief executive Gian Luca Artizzu and NDA chief executive David Peattie, puts practical cleanup work ahead of diplomacy.

The deal lays out three concrete goals. First, the agencies will share decommissioning know-how through meetings and site visits. Second, they will strengthen technical staff skills through targeted training programs. Third, they will use the arrangement to pave the way for future collaborations. For a field where cutting, shielding, contamination control, remote handling and waste packaging all drive cost and schedule, that kind of structured exchange can matter as much as any hardware upgrade.

The timing makes sense. Italy stopped producing nuclear energy in 1987 after a referendum, and the country’s legacy fleet was pushed into decommissioning years before many other nations faced the same burden. Latina, Trino and Caorso were shut and placed in safe store, following the earlier closure of Garigliano in 1982. Sogin was created in 1999 to take over responsibility for decommissioning Italy’s plants and managing radioactive waste.

Latina gives the new partnership immediate technical relevance. The plant began operating in January 1964 and was permanently shut in December 1987. It is a Magnox graphite gas-cooled reactor, the same broad reactor family that has challenged Britain’s cleanup planners across the Magnox portfolio. That overlap matters because the two countries are not comparing notes on abstract policy. They are working on a reactor type that shares the same core decommissioning headaches: aging graphite structures, complex radiological conditions and difficult sequencing of dismantling work.

The NDA has said Magnox decommissioning must be site-specific rather than treated as a one-size-fits-all exercise, a reminder that design, location, age and physical condition all shape the job. UK government material also says the work starts with defueling, followed by on-site spent-fuel storage before eventual transport for reprocessing. Those steps, though routine on paper, define the pace of the entire program.

The Italy-UK agreement also fits a wider Sogin push to export lessons on graphite-reactor cleanup. Sogin recently signed a separate memorandum with Japan Atomic Power Company to study decommissioning methods, with Japan looking to draw on Latina experience for the Tokai-1 reactor. Taken together, the deals show that decommissioning know-how is becoming a tradeable asset in its own right, especially for countries that inherited graphite-moderated reactors and now face the long, expensive task of retiring them safely.