The Fast Breeder nuclear reactor SNR-300 was built near the town of Kalkar, Germany (located in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It was completed but never taken online. It is known as one of the biggest government spending boondoggles in Germany. SNR-300 was to output 327 megawatts. The project ended up costing about 7 billion Deutsche Mark (about 3.5 billion euros or over 4 billion USD). Klaus Traube, then director of the executing company Interatom, is today one of the most prominent German opponents of the usage of nuclear power.
Planning
In the fall of 1972, Germany, Belgium and The
Netherlands charged the Siemens subsidiary Interatom to build a
fast breeder - still a very new technology at the time. The German
government wanted to limit energy import, and, as the uranium
supply in Germany was
limited, a breeder facility to use the limited resources
efficiently was required. The building commenced at the end of the
same year.
Timeline
- 1972: The project commences.
- 1977: Increasing public doubt about the safety of nuclear
energy culminates in the first demonstration, involving about
40,000 people marching in the streets of Kalkar.
- 1979: Three Mile Island suffers a partial meltdown and the
increasing anti-nuclear-power bent of environmentalists causes open
questioning of the project. This discussion leads to an inquiry by
a commission of the Bundestag. Building is interrupted for 4 years
as the commission concludes that the safety of the facility needs
to be upgraded in light of the difficult to control process of fast
breeders, along with concerns about the coolant (sodium, which,
when brought into contact with water, explodes). The interruption
along with the redesign of the safety features raise the costs of
the project significantly. The local state government turns against
the project.
- 1980: Protests radicalize in increasing fashion[].
- 1985: SNR-300 is completed. The reactor is taken into partial
operation. The sodium coolant is already running through the
coolant loop and has to be kept hot using electric heating elements
so it does not solidify. The reactor is ready to receive nuclear
materials. In this phase, the running costs are already more than 5
million euro per month. The state
government (which has authority in matters of nuclear power and
environmental issues) blocks the actual opening of the plant,
against the wishes of the federal government. As elections are
coming up, the German government unofficially decide not to take
SNR-300 into operation just yet. After the elections the newly
formed coalition has a significant environmental fraction. At this
point neither the country government, nor the local state
government want the facility to become operational. Plans for a
second facility, SNR-2, planned to produce 1,500 megawatts,
are officially cancelled around this time.
- 1986: Chernobyl disaster.
- 1991: The official cancellation of the SNR-300 is finally
offered on 21 March. The demolition of parts of the facility costs
another 75 million euros. The unused machinery is put on sale. The
reactor core is transferred to storage elsewhere. The breeder
material, already bought for the operation of the facility, is
transferred to France where it is
mixed into MOX fuel, which is used by a number of France's nuclear
reactors.
- 1995: The facility itself is put up for auction by way of an
announcement in the newspapers. The Dutch
investor/developer Hennie van der Most buys the property for a mere
2.5 million euros. The site is transformed into an amusement park
named Kernwasser Wunderland ("Corewater Wonderland"). It
includes a hotel with 400 beds. In
2005 it was renamed into Wunderland
Kalkar ("Wonderland Kalkar").
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