The chapter analyses the thirty-year long—and still unaccomplished—decision-making process over the siting of a deposit for high-level nuclear waste in Italy. Over decades, this issue has been at the centre of the nuclear power strategy of Italy and all other EU and industrialised countries, and is now prominent on the EU agenda in order to close the nuclear power cycle and determine its sustainability in the energy transition. The chapter describes the failed attempts to solve the problem of siting an unwanted infrastructure through authority and technical expertise, and analyses the very timid approach to deliberative democracy that is unsuccessfully being tested as we write. Comparison with other, more successful, experiences shows that coordinated, inclusive processes that challenge problem definition and manage expectations have higher chances of reaching some degree of consensus over time. Italy’s inability to design inclusive processes for the planning and implementation of infrastructure is further argued in the chapter with a reconstruction of the recent dismantling of the Débat public that was briefly experimented between 2021 and 2023.