Victory for small town that fought Italy's nuclear option

Silvio Berlusconi's government suffered a major humiliation yesterday when popular protests forced it to scrap plans to dump nuclear waste near a tiny southern town. The government planned to concentrate all Italy's nuclear waste, some 80,000sq m of it, in an area the size of a football field, deep underground at a site in the far south.

But in two weeks of massive protests, involving the blocking of road and rail links, the arrival of tens of thousands of demonstrators in Rome and a threatened revolt across a wide swath of southern Italy, the people of the town of Scanzano Jonico, population 7,000, forced the government to back down.

Yesterday there was rejoicing in the town. "Bello, bello, bello!" one protester cried over and over. "A nightmare has ended," Filippo Bubbico, president of the Basilicata region, said. "This is the happiest day of my life," Carlo Carlucci, a resident, told the Italian news agency Ansa. "They just consider us sheep not capable of fighting. But we have shown how tough we are and local pride is unbeatable."

But the ministerial decree issued by Mr Berlusconi's cabinet on 13 November stands, with only the name of the chosen town removed. The government has now given itself 18 months to find another site.

Ermete Realacci, president of Legambiente, Italy's biggest environmental pressure group, said: "The decree must be withdrawn altogether, because there must be transparent and democratic consultation regarding the modalities for storing the waste, and until now that has been totally missing."

Italy voted in a referendum in 1987 to close its nuclear power programme, and the residual waste, with both high- and low-level radioactivity, has been scattered around the country near the dismantled power stations, some in temporary and insecure sites.

Successive governments have balked at addressing the deeply unpopular task of finding a permanent resting-place for waste, some of which will remain dangerous for 150,000 years. But with the emergence of new terrorist threats after the 9/11 attacks on America, increased a year ago when Osama bin Laden added Italy to the list of countries he deemed legitimate targets, the urgency of solving the waste problem has intensified.

Scanzano Jonico was chosen, scientists said, because it has the deepest and largest salt deposits in the country. It was intended to bury the waste 900 metres underground. Geologists compared the geology of the area to that of the region of New Mexico where the United States has concentrated much of its nuclear waste. Experts insisted that it was much the best site in the country.

Unfortunately for Mr Berlusconi, Scanzano Jonico at ground level is not a trackless waste but one of the fastest-growing and most economically dynamic regions in the whole of Italy. A hundred years ago it was a region of marshes, where malaria was endemic. But Mussolini drained the marshes, and in the past 10 years, bold initiatives have transformed the prospects of this raw town.

The area has been dubbed "Italy's California". Advanced farming techniques have brought plums, apricots, grapes and strawberry plantations to the formerly sterile soil. The coastline is broad, sandy and virginal, the sea clean and warm all summer, and holiday villages have sprouted along the coast in the past few years, providing 15,000 holiday beds now, and plans exist to double that number soon.