Nuclear Entertainment
While Poland is trying to assert itself as an important industrial power by building as many as six new nuclear plants, Germany has decided to shut down all of its nuclear plants by the year 2022. Considering all the costs of dismantling nuclear plants and of waste disposal, as well as the threat they pose; the nuclear energy has not turned out to be as clean and as cheap as predicted. We’ve covered the topic of nuclear waste disposal here. However, alongside the economic issues, other questions arise as well, such as: what to do with all these plants? There is one nuclear plant near the town of Kalkar, in northern Germany, which – though it has never really been used as a plant – may offer one of the possible solutions to this question.
From an ambitious plan to the symbol of resistance against nuclear energy; the complex in Kalkar, whose construction began in the early 1970s should have been the most technologically advanced nuclear plant in the world. Its reactor should have been of the SNR 300 fast breeder type, whose uranium core produces more plutonium than the reactor needs; which means that this nuclear plant would have been able to produce clean and safe energy forever. Partially, the plant had started working in 1985, however, due to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (we’ve covered the Chernobyl disaster here) and the public protests organized by the young and the environmentalists; the plant had never been given nuclear material and had never produced electricity. And that’s how an ambitious project worth 8 billion Deutsche Marks at the time (about 4,1 billion Euros) had gone from being a symbol of German engineering and strength to being a symbol of resistance against nuclear energy.
For years it had remained abandoned because nobody wanted to have anything to do with it. Until, finally, in 1995, a Dutch investor Hennie van der Most, decided to buy the nuclear plant. To the surprise of the Germans, he did not want it to be a nuclear plant – he wanted to turn it into Kernwasser Wunderland amusement park instead. A complex task of dismantling instrument panels, pumps, turbines and other equipment followed (it should be pointed out here that nuclear plants have at least three backup systems that replace the main one in case of an accident). Today, 15 years later, only one third of the whole plant has been turned into the amusement park while the rest of this giant concrete piece of architecture still gapes empty. However, the part which has been turned into the amusement park is as impressive as the former nuclear plant project used to be. It consists of a hotel with 437 rooms, 5 restaurants which can host 2000 people, 7 coffee bars, a bowling alley, a go-kart track, a roller coaster, a miniature golf course, a tennis court, a trampoline, a carrousel and a lot of other amusement park features. Nowadays, a-once-nuclear-plant receives 600 000 visitors a year. This number is bound to increase further because it is planned make use of the remaining two-thirds of the facility as well. These expansion plans include not only more entertainment for the young, but also a setting-up of a big meeting-place for retired people where they could meet and socialize over common interests.
The irony of this transformation is that from a nuclear energy producer – nuclear energy which in itself has been presented as clean, safe and cheap – the plant has become a huge consumer. To put in motion all of its features, the amusement park currently spends 3 million kilowatt-hours and 550 000 cubic meters of gas. Han Groot Obbink, the facility manager for the last 15 years, does not have a stand on the issue of nuclear plants shut-down in Germany; his only concern is the possibility of rise in prices of electrical energy, which would then have a significant effect on the job in question. To tackle the lack of energy, the amusement park management is considering the possibility of putting up wind-propelled turbines and building installations that would produce energy from biogas. Should it be achieved, it would really be an interesting example of how to create renewable energy sources from nuclear energy via amusement park. In this way, after many representations it had during its history, the plant would become a symbol of transition to renewable energy.
Tonči Kranjčević Batalić
