Atoms for Industry. The Early Nuclear Activities of Fiat and the Atoms for Peace Program in Italy, 1956-1959

Fiat’s involvement in the nuclear industry has been a largely neglected aspect of its history, of the history of nuclear energy in Italy, and of the history of the Atoms for Peace program. The company’s interest in the atomic sector dated back to the immediate postwar period, when it financed initiatives meant to reconstruct applied and theoretical research on nuclear physics in Italy. However, its actual industrial involvement originated in the framework of the Atoms for peace program, which provided the opportunity for the purchase of an American Machine & Foundry pool-type reactor. The reactor was to be located in the new atomic research center of Saluggia, near Turin, founded by SORIN (Società Ricerche Impianti Nucleari), a joint-venture created in 1956 by Fiat and the Italian chemical company Montecatini. SORIN would develop know-how and technology in the electromechanical and radioisotopes / biomedical industries. Inaugurated in 1959, Saluggia was the first European nuclear research center constructed and operated by a private company, and the first private initiative within the Atoms for Peace framework. President Eisenhower himself underlined the “exceptional case” of Fiat. In 1973 SORIN was transformed into SORIN Biomedica. This article is meant as a first attempt to assess Fiat’s involvement in the nuclear sector, as a case-study in the reception of the Atoms for peace program in Italy, on how different actors on the Italian nuclear scene used it in order to pursue their own goals, and as an episode in Western techno-scientific collaboration during the Cold War. Mainly based on unpublished sources from the Fiat Archives and the Italian Nuclear Energy Agency (CNEN) Archives, after a brief overview on Italian civilian nuclear policy in the 1950s and early 1960s, the paper will trace SORIN’s early activities in the framework of the Atoms for peace program, up to the inauguration of the Saluggia research center in 1959.