Dear Stakeholder,
The 2019 edition of the Sustainability Report is a special one, as it does not only provide accounting details of the Group activities, but it also offers an opportunity to retrace the steps of the Group over the last 20 years.
We are proud to share with you the milestones of our development process, which led us to grow in a sustainable way, considering the attention to environment and safety , the strong presence on the territory and the reliable relations with our Stakeholders, the core of our strategy.
The current Board of Directors took office in December 2019, after a year which recorded a significant reduction in the volume of decommissioning activities and was marked by a strong management and operational discontinuity. Despite this scenario of contraction, at the end of last year, we have achieved an important goal: we have completed the reclamation of the so called “monolith”, a joint series of pits made by reinforced concrete, containing radioactive waste, buried on Rotondella ITREC site. The success of this activity, unique in the international panorama, emphasizes the highly qualified know-how of the Group and constitutes a best practice in nuclear remediation.
Since we took office, we made significant efforts to stimulate the Group’s business operations. We started by revising the decommissioning programme according to the suggestions and indications described in the final report of the Peer Review made by IAEA in the frame of the Artemis Programme, and we continued by changing our organizational structure, to be more effective and create more synergies among our sites.
We worked intensively to prepare a new Business Plan, close to publication, aimed at the recovery of efficiency and focused on the core business, through the reopening of large construction sites and the launch of big environmental remediation projects, which place Sogin Group on the path to achieving ambitious undertakings in line with the New European Green Deal.
For the first time, our Sustainability Report describes the efforts undertaken by Sogin Group to achieve the UN SDGs, with the implementation of decommissioning and radioactive waste management programmes, and with the adoption of voluntary measures to ensure sustainability in the relations with Stakeholders and in the protection of the environment.
Year 2019 also showed a strong drive towards innovation with the start of the development of the AIGOR software. This software will enable to extend the stringent procedures adopted in the radioactive waste management to any sources and materials, including already produced releasable ones or those that will results from future nuclear decommissioning activities, thus generating a complete and certified set of data available to future generations.
Moreover, once again in 2019, the doors of our plants were opened to the public during a “green” edition of Open Gate, an event which combined the dialogue with our Stakeholders with the principle of environmental awareness. The plastic free initiative received moral support from the Ministry of the Environment and gathered thousands of citizens, families and young people interested in knowing more about our commitment in closing the nuclear fuel cycle.
Finally, since February 2020, we had to face the COVID-19 emergency which has posed a serious and unprecedented challenge for our country. In this framework, we have proved our readiness to action, with the adoption of timely measures not only to guarantee the safety of our employees and staff, but also to show our local commitment, especially in the most impacted areas, by putting our competencies and skills at the service of the national institutions.