Population growth, sustainable development, energy resources and environmental protection: the nuclear option

This paper deals with the satisfaction of the future global energy demand. The gravity of the situation the world is going to face in the coming years is due to many and conflicting problems (world population growth, sustainable development, energy resources, environmental protection). Probably some Countries like Italy live these gravity much more then others, may be because they renounced the nuclear energy in the past. In the paper the authors propose an investigation about the contribute the nuclear energy should had given to the energy production in Italy. At this purpose two possible scenarios at 2010 have been compared by using a linear optimization problem: the first considers the energy sources currently in use, the second takes into account also the nuclear.