The
lake
Brasimone is an artificial lake, created between 1910 and 1933 with
the purpose of producing hydroelectric energy, in the Appennini mountains
in Italy, about 60 Km South of the city of Bologna, and North of Florence,
about midway between the two.
Since 1960 the italian nuclear agency (at the time C.N.E.N. = Comitato Nazionale Energia Nucleare) had created a research center on the site. In the sixties Italy was pretty advanced in the nuclear energy field, and was experimenting, as many other countries, with many different "types" of nuclear reactors. At the Brasimone site it was originally planned to build a reactor with "organic" refrigeration fluid. And construction began.
As time went by, the "organic cooled reactor" idea slowly lost interest for technical reasons, and slowly the "fast breeder reactor" came more and more out of science-fiction into the realm of the possible. Without entering into technical details, this type of reactor is called "fast" because it uses "fast neutrons", contrary to the common types, based on "slow" or "thermal neutrons" for the chain reaction. This difference makes it possible the so called "breeding" that means the production of new "combustible", although of a different type, in a quantity higher than the used one(!).
It is like if you had a special type of car, where you put in the tank, say, 30 liters of petrol (gas). You just drive around as you want, and when you have to get petrol again, in an auxiliary tank will have collected itself, like a "byproduct", 40 liters of oil! A dream, that for years was being pursued all over the world. First the Phenix and then the huge Superphenix were built in France under the control and cooperation of the C.E.A. ( = Commissariat a l' Energie Atomique) as working demonstrations of the feasibility of this dream, together with other Europeans countries.
Italy
was part of this project, and in this context it was decided that the Brasimone
site could host, instead of the obsolete "organic reactor", a test installation
for different types of fuel cells (=elementi combustibile) of this new
type of reactor. The existing reactor buildings of the never completed
"organic reactor" had to be reused, of course with the needed adaptations.
From this valuable idea, to have a small reactor, but a working one, just to test the fuel cells under many different normal and accidental conditions, was born the project "P.E.C." = Prova Elementi Combustibile. The reactor had never the purpose to produce energy, the generated power had to be dissipated. It could have been a really valuable tool, not only for Italy but also for the european partner countries. But the construction had so many delays (mainly not due to technical reasons), that for example the "Superphenix" (to the design of which the PEC should have contributed, testing its fuel cells) was operational much before PEC was completed.
As a matter of fact, construction of PEC was stopped in 1987 from the italian government, after a referendum concerning the use of nuclear energy in Italy. The level of completion reached was probably at the time around 70%, if not more.
Here you can find some more images of the PEC site, most of them are photographs that I personally took, back in 1982, while visiting the construction site, during the period of my Thesis writing.
Claudio Pedrazzi, July 2002.