When is comes to supervillains Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi makes Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor look like Lex Loser. He’s changed his appearance at least once. He has several lavish and secluded hideouts. He is the country’s richest man and controls vast parts of its media. His government has passed bills making him immune from prosecution. Next up, Berlusconi wants to revive Italy’s nuclear industry 22 years after a national referendum voted to reject nuclear power. In a flourish we’ve come to expect from one of the world’s top supervillains, there are reports that Berlusconi may allow a new fleet of reactors to be built on military sites meaning they are unaccountable regional and local authorities. Can an announcement about Italy’s first satellite made of diamonds or plans to build a fleet of space shuttles to poison the Earth be far behind?

Meanwhile, in America, a new tourist attraction has opened – the first nuclear weapons production facility in Hanford, Washington is now open to the public. It’s an interesting choice of holiday destination to say the least. ‘Did you go away this year, Fred?’ ‘I did indeed, Bob. I took the wife and kids to the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States.’ How do you beat that, we wonder. A tour of Dante’s Inferno, perhaps?

And there’s more bad news for the nuclear industry’s risible claims that nuclear power is safe. Tim Murphy, federal facilities bureau chief for the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, says of the nuclear contamination from the Nevada nuclear weapons test site creeping ever closer to local drinking water supplies: ‘Unfortunately, today there is no technology to clean this up.’ The Department of Energy’s Bill Wilborn agrees: ‘The only thing we can do at this point is adopt a long-term monitoring plan’. That’s the spirit! A ‘fingers crossed’ approach should do wonders for building public trust in nuclear power. Reports that the nuclear industry’s new slogan is ‘Nuclear power: Because we’re all dead in the long term’ were denied by a spokesman.