Why The Car Company Fiat Once Built Its Own Nuclear Reactor

We all have things we like doing to unwind a bit in the evening. Maybe it’s enjoying a nice dinner before watching whatever the latest streaming hit is. Maybe it’s a tinker in your garage. For Jason, it’s likely analyzing the minutia of some 80-year-old Czechoslovakian taillight. Hey, who am I to judge, when I can often be found reading about historical Italian car minutia? Which is exactly what I found myself doing a few days ago as I started burrowing down the Fiat rabbit hole, brushing up on a bit of World War II era history after a debate about the less-than-stellar histories of a few car brands at work.

It’s under these circumstances I found myself reading up on one Professor Vittorio Valletta, the president of Fiat, who falls on the timeline between founder Giovanni Agnelli, and his legendary, playboy-industrialist grandson, Gianni. For a century now, Fiat has passed more or less from grandfather to grandson out of necessity, as the second and fourth generations have been struck by tragedies and these gaps have been filled by what can be seen effectively as caretaker-leaders. Vittorio was the first of these, taking the reins from Giovanni upon his death in 1945. It may seem at first like these interim presidents aren’t of much consequence, since they don’t have Agnelli blood in their veins, but this would be a mistake. Lest we forget, Sergio Marchionne was one such inter-Agnelli leader, and he managed to save the whole company from imploding by way of merging with Chrysler.

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Not unlike our be-sweatered, Canadian-Italian friend, Vittorio Valletta had a rather difficult job, though you could argue his was much worse. Italy had been under the control of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini for twenty years, the last few of which featured the country being bombed to bits by Allied forces before switching sides, then getting destroyed a bit more by the retreating Nazis. After the war, several top Fiat executives, including Valletta, were arrested as collaborators with the Mussolini regime, but were acquitted when it was shown that Fiat had falsified their records and had indeed been actively supporting the resistance with vehicles, fuel, and cash. According to historian Sergio Favretto, Vittorio himself had been hidden under Allied protection in the hills outside Turin for a time at the end of the war, so his political credentials for taking the helm after the recently deceased Giovanni Agnelli were acceptable.

A Man And The Marshall Plan

As I browsed through the history of this slightly more obscure Fiat president, my eyes fell upon an article from the Journal Of Cold War Studies that made my jaw hit the floor. During this post-war period, Fiat built the first privately owned nuclear reactor in Europe. Yes, the car company that you know from the classic “Fix It Again Tony” joke decided it wanted in on the nuclear-everything trend of the 1950s. Now, this is where I really wish I could tell you Fiat built some nuclear-powered electric concept car. Alas, the closest we’ll ever get to that was the Simca Fulgur concept from 1958 that would supposedly, eventually, have had nuclear batteries to power an electric motor. At the time, Simca was owned by Fiat, but it likely never had any engine at all and most likely has since been destroyed. For the rest of Fiat history, the company has generally stuck to the usual gasoline, diesel, and electric powertrains we all know and love (or loathe).

As a car manufacturer, Fiat predates all of this by several decades, having been founded in 1899 in a coffee bar as noted in the truly fantastic book Mondo Agnelli by Jennifer Clark, beating even Ford and General Motors by a few years. The company had long been focused on building technologically advanced vehicles for the era and as it was located in Turin, home to a thriving Polytechnic University, it was happy to reap the benefits of some of the best and brightest local talent. Fiat soon branched out into more than just cars, building marine engines and airplanes, as well as purchasing La Stampa and Juventus, the local Torinese newspaper and soccer club.

As it so happened, Italy was generally in on some cutting-edge science before the war as well, with one of the country’s top nuclear physicists, Enrico Fermi, fleeing the fascists and joining the Manhattan Project. One of his students, and an outstanding nuclear physicist in his own right, Eduardo Amaldi, contacted Professor Valletta shortly after the war, seeking funding to revive nuclear studies in Italy. As Professor Barbara Curli of the University of Turin puts it, “Valletta believed that Italy’s increased international nuclear prestige and visibility would facilitate national progress, and thus Fiat’s own progress, in the field.”

Having managed to survive the war with a reasonable amount of money and seeking to make even more through continued diversification, in 1946 Fiat decided to pursue nuclear energy and research through teaming up with other companies including Italian electric company Edison, Italian metals company Cogne Steel, chemical company Montecatini, and even Pirelli to create Centro Italiano Studi ed Espirienze, or CISE. Ever early to the party, this actually predated the founding of the International Atomic Energy Agency by a year and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) by eight.

Initially, CISE and a couple other Italian acronyms were ready to make nuclear reactors pop up like mushrooms, and it briefly became the fashion for large companies to pursue building their own nuclear power plants, but the Italian government also wanted in on this fresh source of what was thought to be cheap and easy electricity. At the time, Italy was still debating nationalization of their electric industry and the control of energy plants was no small factor in this. There was just one little catch; according to Article 51 of the Treaty Of Paris between Italy and the Allied Powers, “Italy shall not possess, construct or experiment with any atomic weapon.” In order to end their part of the war, Italy had given up their ability to have much of a national nuclear industry.

Having signed away its ability to pursue a nuclear arms program, the country was severely limited by the Allies on just how much highly enriched Uranium they could hold. In an uncharacteristic show of muscle, the usually somewhat weak Italian government slid in and quickly built a couple of nuclear reactors, thereby claiming a healthy slice of the U235 pie for themselves. However, as noted in “One Hundred Years Of Fiat”  the company had a reasonable industrial history with the US dating all the way back to 1910 when they built an assembly plant in Poughkeepsie, New York. This gave them good standing for getting a bit of Marshall Plan reconstruction funding and a foot in the door when Atoms For Peace was launched. This initiative was launched by President Eisenhower in 1953 with a goal “To hasten the day when fear of the atom will begin to disappear from the minds the people and the governments of the East and West”

By the summer of 1955, Valletta was in communication with Lewis Strauss of the US Atomic Energy Commission, asking permission to pursue negotiations to buy a reactor, and was in attendance at the first Geneva International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. Barely a year later, President Eisenhower sent a personal letter to Valletta celebrating the importance of Fiat as the first private company to benefit from the Atoms For Peace program. Naturally, as noted by Professor Curli, it was printed on the front page of La Stampa. For its part, the US supported the private nuclear industry in Italy and had even managed to turn it into a bit of entertainment with the “Mostra Atomica” tour of 1954. According to researcher Donatella Germanese, of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in The Annals Of Science, “a stand-alone mobile atomic exhibition promoting Atoms for Peace traveled through Italy and beyond, with no need for being hosted in a building since the five special vans that transported equipment and objects served as showrooms as well.”

The “Atomic Citadel of Saluggia”

After having selected two sites for reactors at Saluggia and Boffalora, both located between Milan and Turin, Fiat and CISE found that budgets had tightened and the US had realized that handing out lots of 20% highly enriched uranium to all sorts of people was a bit questionable, even with non-proliferation agreements in place.

Fiat had also internally reorganized its nuclear research section, tightened its link with Montecatini, and created Società Ricerche Impianti Nucleari or SORIN. Ambitions had been scaled back a bit to the realm of a single research reactor to be built at Saluggia, and as Professor Curli notes in her article, Fiat entered into an agreement with American Machine and Foundry (AMF) to purchase a swimming pool-type nuclear reactor – yes, the same AMF that also made bowling equipment, industrial pretzel knotting machines, and would eventually own Harley-Davidson for a while. The reactor would be named Avogadro RS-1, after the local Torinese scientist and professor Amadeo Avogadro, who’s law and number you may remember if you paid attention in your high school chemistry and physics class. Incidentally, while discussing this article, David Tracy was still able to remember 6.0221. I took Earth and environmental instead of chem-phys, so I just agreed.

Before you get all excited with mental images of Chernobyl or The Simpsons, let’s understand what we’re dealing with. Instead of a massive reactor pressure vessel and immense cooling towers visible to everyone for miles around, this was a somewhat scaled-down design. At the time, Italian scientific magazine La Tecnica Illustrata described it in their January 1960 issue as (my translation) “a large open pool with a volume of over 600 cubic meters filled with purified water in which the reactor core is immersed, consisting of fuel elements of 20% enriched Uranium 235.”

This is slightly less than one quarter of an Olympic-size swimming pool and is about 10 meters deep. The design is safe enough that people can actually walk above the reactor while it’s operating, making it rather useful for materials testing and research, and similar swimming pool reactors are still in use at numerous facilities around the world today. According to documents from the International Atomic Energy Agency, Avogadro RS-1 had a maximum output of seven thermal megawatts. Interestingly, in his inauguration speech printed in the November-December 1959 issue of company magazine Fiat Illustrato, Professor Valletta stated a maximum output of five thermal megawatts, suggesting the reactor was pushed to a slightly higher power level over time. By comparison, the Advanced Test Reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory has a power of two hundred and fifty thermal megawatts. According to Fiat Illustrato, work began on building the SORIN facility in 1957, and by late November of 1959, Avogadro went critical for the first time after the Archbishop of Vercelli, Monsignor Imberti, blessed the reactor and asked “God’s blessing would fall down on Fiat.”

What exactly SORIN did with this reactor is a little difficult to pin down. Fiat has a long and glorious history of not always keeping the best records; in fact they didn’t even produce consolidated financial reports until well into the 1980s. While there are materials testing applications with a research reactor of this design that could be useful, and the pool itself was built with access points that would be useful for such activities, neutron diffraction testing for impurities in the metals of engine components for example, it appears SORIN instead ended up focusing primarily on biomedical research.

To those of us located outside of Italy 60 years later, this may seem wildly out of the usual realm of Fiat, but at the time and within Italy, almost nothing was actually outside of Fiat’s reach. They owned or had significant interests in everything from washing machine manufacturers and publishing houses to alcohol distilling and infrastructure construction. To this day, Fiat may be part of Stellantis, but they brought numerous subsidiaries in with them, including CNH for heavy equipment, Teksid for metal castings, and Comau for automation. Exor N.V., the current iteration of the Agnelli family holding company, still has significant investments in numerous companies outside of the automotive world, including fashion brands Christian Louboutin and Shang Xia, and healthcare companies LifeNet, Institut Mèireux, and Philips. It’s also noted in the November 1968 issue of Illustrato Fiat that replacement fuel elements for the “Enrico Fermi” Trino Vercellese nuclear power plant were built at the facility.

By the late 60s, Fiat’s focus in SORIN had fully moved away from nuclear power due to the limitations of Article 51 as well as the nationalization of the Italian electric industry and the incredibly wild “Ippolito case,” which involved the murder of ENI (the Italian national oil company) president Enrico Mattei by way of bomb-induced plane crash that may have been perpetrated by the CIA, French OAS, or the mafia. This also resulted in the murders and disappearances of several people involved in the investigation. Needless to say, biomedical research was a much safer path than potentially upsetting the more traditional energy industry by attempting to continue the pursuit of nuclear power.

“Promessa Del Futuro?” Sort of…

So, what happened to Avogadro? Like many reactors, for such a complex bit of equipment, it didn’t have a particularly long lifespan. The reactor itself was shut down in 1971, but because the process of actually deconstructing a nuclear facility is a rather delicate procedure both physically and administratively, the internals were not completely dismantled until September of 1978, and the facility was officially decommissioned by 1980. As detailed in the IAEA decommissioning report:

“When the underwater exposure rate had been measured to determine the most suitable method of moving and chopping components for insertion into shielded containers, the components were dismantled and cut up into sections less than one meter in size, The work was for the most part, carried out under water either by means of hydraulic chopper controlled from the side of the pool, or by divers who carried out the mechanical disassembly and cutting with arc welders in the pool itself.”

But why waste a perfectly good pool? Starting In 1984, the Avogadro facility became a storage site for spent nuclear fuel and holds sixty-four spent fuel elements from two Italian nuclear power plants, which was still the case as of the last update published by the IAEA in 2018. As for SORIN, it was spun off to become Sorin Biomedica in 1973, though still controlled by Fiat. This is hardly surprising, as according to author Alan Friedman in his book “Agnelli and the Network of Italian Power,” by the mid-80s, Fiat would control about 25% of the Borsa Italiana stock exchange.

Within three years of becoming a separate company, Sorin Biomedica was profitable in its own right and began to take over competitors in its field. Eventually, they focused on cardiovascular medical devices and operated in this area comfortably for a few decades. Through their history of mergers and separations, the diagnostics division of Sorin Biomedica was sold and merged with other biomedical companies in 1997, eventually becoming DiaSorin, which now works in the field of molecular diagnostics and still has a facility in Saluggia, next door to Avogadro. The rest of what was once Sorin Biomedica eventually merged with Cyberonics to become what is now LivaNova.

The Avogadro facility still stands today and can be found easily on Google Maps, with the reactor building looking unchanged from the photos in old issues of Illustrato Fiat and La Tecnica Illustrata. Some of the waste in what has become the “Avogadro Deposit” has, over time, been shipped to France, the UK, and the US for processing, but some may return to Italy as lower-level radioactive waste. Like many nations with a nuclear history, Italy is continuing to grapple with what to do with the waste it still has and hasn’t yet been able to decide upon a suitable permanent storage facility due to seismic, hydrogeologic, and governmental concerns, though areas very close to Saluggia are on the list of possible sites.

I was able to find the Avogadro Deposit listed among other fully owned companies in the annual financial report for FCA from 2017, and as of 2023, the Italian Ministry of Environment and Energy Security still lists the facility as being owned and managed by Stellantis. I tried to reach out to Stellantis to confirm if they still own the site, and unfortunately, did not hear back, but as a nuclear waste holding site changing hands would be well documented, it is quite likely that Fiat still owns their very own little nuclear facility. The nuclear waste itself is owned and controlled by Sogin, the Italian state company responsible for nuclear decommissioning. So the next time you hear someone try to make the tired old “Fix It Again Tony” joke, perhaps inform them that the company they’re making fun of has managed to hold nuclear material for almost seventy years without a disaster, so maybe they deserve a little more respect.

Note: My immense gratitude to Professor Barbara Curli of the University of Turin for her research into the early nuclear history of Fiat as well as her assistance in providing additional historical resources for my own research. For a much more in-depth 1950s history of Fiat’s nuclear work, please see her article, “Atoms For Industry; The Early Nuclear Activities of Fiat And The Atoms For Peace Program In Italy, 1956-1959” in The Journal Of Cold War Studies. This article also contains Amazon affiliate links, so if you buy a book about old Italian industrialists, The Autopian might get a commission.