Italy's conservative leader Silvio Berlusconi, who is favored to win April elections, would put international alliances in nuclear power as one of his top priorities in office, daily la Repubblica reports Thursday.
A center-right government led by Berlusconi would encourage Italian state-controlled utility Enel SpA (EN) to invest in nuclear power abroad, especially in France, the paper says.
Italians voted in a 1987 referendum to scrap the country's nuclear power facilities on the back of the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine the year before. Most of Italy's electricity is generated from plants running on natural gas and fuel oil. Crude oil prices have surged in recent years.