Nuclear Energy and Science Policy in Post-war Italy

The first Italian researcher to mention the possibility of producing energy by breaking the energy bonds of atomic nuclei was Enrico Fermi at the end of the 1920s, and the idea echoed during the 1930s and 1940s. After 1945, his students who had remained in Rome, together with other physicists in Milan, Padua and Turin, created the 'Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare' (INFN) (1951), and participated in the Italian nuclear committee CNRN, then nuclear agency CNEN-ENEA. While trying to promote the development of nuclear power in Italy, the nuclear committee subsidized the INFN and created research centers for applied nuclear research and for particle physics. The committee also became involved in other fields (such as genetics and molecular biology), and in programs to improve science education and the public understanding of science. All these commitments, notwithstanding some ambiguities, played a key role in shaping the scientific environment of Italy during the 1950s and the 1960s. With all its limitations, the Italian nuclear program was an important driver for industrial innovation and scientific research, well beyond the boundaries of closely related fields, and its crisis after the "Ippolito affair" in 1963-1964 hit the Italian research and development system deeply.