Caen is a leading company in measurement systems used in major international nuclear physics experiments. A leadership that has led it to be one of the most reliable partners of CERN in Geneva, with which it has collaborated, making available the excellent measuring instruments, also used in the discovery of the Higgs boson. A race that continues today for the realization of the Cern super particle accelerator. In addition to working in tandem with Geneva, there is the close collaboration, as an industrial partner, with the International Atomic Energy Agency of Vienna which aims, under the aegis of the UN, to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy by excluding it for military purposes. A partnership also to develop tools with immediate repercussions: from checking any illicit uses of nuclear power, to environmental monitoring of ionizing radiation in the air. Caen, with sales offices in the USA and Germany and a turnover of 25 million, is present in 80 countries around the world, providing instrumentation and assistance to research centers and sites with activities related to the nuclear industry. All this is possible today thanks to a task force of 170 employees, excluding production, half of whom have degrees in engineering, physics and computer science, with an average age of 35. A large company, born small from the “American” dream of its founder: a young researcher from the National Institute of Nuclear Physics struggling with budgetary needs dictated by an equally young family.
The need to make ends meet pushed him, in ’79, to accept a research job from a private individual to create electronic forms. The yes had been accompanied by the commitment to bring within the university what was realized and discovered privately.
The current reality shows that the bet, made by the founder Marcello Givoletti, on the business-research combination has been won. “We who work for safety are aware of the fear that the word nuclear power plants arouses – says the CEO of Caen Marcello Givoletti – but we must look at the IV generation plants, in the awareness that in 20 years there will be no alternative energy source in able to satisfy our needs. The US and France have understood this, investing in innovative reactors and SMRs (Small modular Reactors) and Ads (accelerated Driven Reactors), that is intrinsically safe subcritical reactors and also radioactive waste burners ».
Physicist Massimo Morichi, a runaway brain, first in the US and later in France, now at the top of Caen as vice president, is also reassuring on this point. In Morichi’s curriculum also the coordination, as project leader, of the decontamination interventions in Fukushima, when he was director of research and innovation of the Areva group, the French nuclear giant. «We have all also experienced Chernobyl – says Morichi – and we are working on an Italian national monitoring network to measure radioactivity in transit. Solutions are also being studied to control the release into the sea of over 1 million tons of water – used to cool the reactors of the Daichi nuclear power plant in Japan – contaminated by Tritium ».
Morichi invites us to move along the lines indicated by French President Emmanuel Macron who announced his intention to take the path of green nuclear power. “The counter-proof that this is the right decision – explains Morichi – comes from the example of Germany that has stopped nuclear power: it has spent three times as much to create energy power equivalent to France, with triple CO2”.