Germany - once the proud nation of high-tech industry and global-exporting factories - now finds itself fringed by tales of what might have been: abandoned innovation parks, ruined industrial halls, and ambitious visions lost to decay.
The Greifswald nuclear power plant was supposed to secure a post-lignite future for East Germany. The massive structure on the Baltic coast supplied ten percent of the country's electricity at one time, but was never completed. For a quarter of a century, this billion-dollar boondoggle has been undergoing demolition.
The future smells of peas. It's a pungent, oily odor that has lingered in the deepest recesses of the nuclear-powered past. Even near the reactor core, behind man-high doors made of heavy steel, the pervasive smell of the biofuel that is produced in large reactors outside the sprawling facility on the Greifswald Bodden is overpowering.
Large, but that's relative. Compared to the largest nuclear power plant in East Germany, the rapeseed oil plant shrinks to dwarf proportions: The 50-meter-high turbine hall of the former VEB Kombinat Kernkraftwerke "Bruno Leuschner" stretches for over a kilometer, barely a kilometer and a half from the Baltic Sea coast. "VEB" means "Volkseigener Betrieb" - people owned business.
In front of it, the reactor buildings, more than 120 meters wide, rise like towers – four angular concrete giants that, according to the original plans, were intended to house eight Russian VVER 440/230 reactors. It`s the same type still in operation today in the Czech Republic, Finland, Cuba, Russia, Hungary, and Ukraine.
For the plant located right next to the small town of Lubmin, its future came to an end in 1990. A quarter of a century after the East German leadership decided to invest in a lignite-free energy supply in this remote corner of the Peene River, using Soviet nuclear technology, the demolition order was issued – too uncertain, too vulnerable, too risky.
The Greifswald nuclear power plant is today a 30-year-old demolition site, where the federally owned EWN nuclear facilities disposal company is working to transform the GDR's largest energy producer back into a green field.
It's a costly undertaking that has become increasingly expensive over the years. This is a recurring theme: the construction of the mammoth plant itself had already more than doubled its original budget just five years after the foundation stone was laid.
But the GDR had no other choice. The quality of its own lignite, the backbone of its energy supply, was declining, and the coal seam was getting deeper and deeper. In mining regions like the Geiseltal, production fell so drastically that experts predicted to the SED Politburo in the early 1970s that there would be too little coal after 1984 to supply the national economy with electricity.
The construction near Greifswald – built in twelve-hour shifts by, among others, fitters from the VEB Imo Merseburg and experts from the Central Institute for Welding Technology in Halle – was supposed to be the solution. The first four reactor units alone supplied approximately ten percent of East Germany's electricity needs after commissioning.
Together with the four additional units in Lubmin, which were about to be started up, the Stendal nuclear power plant under construction, and a planned nuclear power plant near Dessau, East Germany would have covered 75 percent of its electricity needs with nuclear power from the late 1990s onward.
In the narrow corridors and wide halls of Unit 6, behind steel walls and airtight doors, one can now visit the final repository of the East German leadership's nuclear power dreams. Only the first four units here ever generated electricity.
Unit 5 was in the trial phase, and Unit 6 almost reached completion, despite extensive redesigns and improvements to the safety precautions, which had been recognized as inadequate, following a malfunction in December 1975 and the Chernobyl accident.
In the narrow corridors and wide halls of Unit 6, behind steel walls and airtight doors, one can now visit the final repository of the East German leadership's nuclear power dreams.
The Greifswald nuclear power plant, built without the containment dome common elsewhere and cooled directly with Baltic Sea water, was equipped with stainless steel wet condensation chambers and additional measuring and control systems designed to prevent a meltdown.
Even today, the control room, with its hundreds of buttons, dials, and analog gauges, resembles a museum. And it's one that will be around for a long time to come.
After 25 years of dismantling, little remains of the green field. While all radioactive components have been removed, decontaminated, and transported to the adjacent interim storage facility, the remaining, gigantic debris will take decades to clear.
The GDR spent 30 billion marks on the eight reactors of the Greifswald nuclear power plant. The demolition is now estimated to cost 6.6 billion euros.
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