Remaining places open for rare tour inside Rome's nuclear research centre
Residents have until Monday to claim one of the last available spots for guided tours of Italy's nuclear decommissioning facilities at the Centro Ricerche Casaccia in Rome. The visits take place on Friday, 25 September as part of the European Researchers' Night, an EU Commission initiative.
Registration closes Monday, 21 September at midnight. Prospective visitors must sign up through sogin.it or nucleco.it.
What the visits cover
Sogin, the state-owned company responsible for dismantling Italy's nuclear plants, offers three separate one-hour tours. Participants may join only one path and must provide personal data and a copy of their identity document at booking.
Two of the three tours admit children aged five and older if accompanied by an adult.
Tour 1: Opec-1 plant
The first route visits the Opec-1 facility, home to Italy's earliest nuclear research activities. Visitors will watch a simulation of irradiated nuclear fuel handling operations.
Opec-1 was the site of Italy's first experiments in nuclear technology.
Tour 2: Opec-2 plant
The second tour covers the control room and external depot areas of Opec-2. Demonstrations will show how technicians measure radioactivity and deploy special containment tents — sealed structures with built-in gloves that allow operators to dismantle contaminated components from outside, preventing particle dispersal.
These containment systems were used to dismantle 56 ageing glove boxes from the Plutonium plant at Casaccia.
Tour 3: Nucleco laboratories
The third tour visits Nucleco, the Sogin Group company that handles radioactive waste from medicine, industry and research across Italy. Visitors will see laboratories for radiological characterisation, waste treatment areas, and temporary storage facilities where materials await transfer to the future National Repository.
Nucleco collects, conditions and stores low and medium-activity waste from hospitals and factories nationwide. In July, the company began shipping waste to the United Kingdom for thermal treatment to reduce its volume by roughly 95 percent.
Additional events in Rome
Sogin will also host a free exhibition space at the Net Village in Città dell'Altra Economia in Rome on Friday, 25 September and Saturday, 26 September, as part of the Net – Science Together project.
How to book
Interested residents should visit sogin.it or nucleco.it, select a preferred tour and time slot, and upload identity documentation. The tours last approximately one hour each.
The event offers a close view of the safety technologies used in nuclear plant decommissioning and radioactive waste management, part of efforts to promote scientific literacy and encourage young people toward STEM disciplines — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
