Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used

atlasobscura.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 147 posts

Re: Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used

#31

Post by acidburnNSA »

The one that really breaks my heart is the SNR-300, a cutting-edge liquid metal sodium-cooled breeder reactor capable of unlocking the full potential of the majority isotope (U-238) rather than just the minority (U-235), giving us literally billions of years of current-day whole-earth power from known uranium resources (including seawater and erosion). It was 100% completed and ready to come up to power, but then Chernobyl happened and the people (of Germany) revolted. It is now an amusement park.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300

Another related timing coincidence is that a smaller sodium-cooled reactor in the USA (the EBR-2) demonstrated completely passive shutdown in loss of flow and loss of heat sink accidents without any control rods going in just 2 weeks before Chernobyl happened. Of course today almost no one has heard of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...

Re: Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used

#32

Post by awesomeMilou »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #31

The one that really breaks my heart is the SNR-300, a cutting-edge liquid metal sodium-cooled breeder reactor capable of unlocking the full potential of the majority isotope (U-238) rather than just the minority (U-235), giving us literally billions of years of current-day whole-earth power from known uranium resources (including seawater and erosion). It was 100% completed and ready to come up to power, but then Che…

I grew up close to Kalkar and visited the theme park that is now located at the power plant a few times as a kid.

If you read the timeline, you can see that the protests started before the Chernobyl disaster. At that point, no government entity wanted the reactor to go online.

Some of my family members went to protest there when they were younger. Our physics teachers discussed the plant with us on several occasions as part of the mandatory curriculum. I can just say, Germany's relationship to nuclear is and was always characterized by strange concerns about environmental issues and a drive just to oppose something for vague political associations. It's hard to describe, but feels very similar to virtue signaling.

Re: Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used

#33

Post by oceanofsolaris »

t312227 wrote: post #5

imho (!) ... nice articles ... but - there is always a but ;)) yes, part of it was the "anti-nuclear sentiment" ... but i would say, only a smaller part. the "real" reason was internal austrian politics. you have to know the background: during the 1970ties a left-leaning socialist government propelled the country into the future - implemented a large package of reforms -, after decades of societal backlash & stagnati…

Also interesting: Kreisky totally didn’t resign after the vote ended against Zwentendorf…so the whole thing was for nothing in the end.

The operator of the plant assumed that the politicians would get to their senses at some point and kept it in operational shape for some years even though it wasn’t producing any power. Then they went bankrupt because pretend-running a nuclear plant is expensive.

Re: Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used

#34

Post by TomK32 »

rjzzleep wrote: post #21
t312227 wrote: post #5

imho (!) ... nice articles ... but - there is always a but ;)) yes, part of it was the "anti-nuclear sentiment" ... but i would say, only a smaller part. the "real" reason was internal austrian politics. you have to know the background: during the 1970ties a left-leaning socialist government propelled the country into the future - implemented a large package of reforms -, after decades of societal backlash & stagnati…

You throw in left-leaning socialist and liberal-conservative as if it's supposed to clarify the story. Both of those terms meant vastly different things from now 50 years ago. Can you be a bit more precise with your 2 cents so we can actually understand what you're saying? Social Democracy isn't "socialist left", but leaving that aside, what you're saying is that the social democrats of the time tried to create energ…

It was only in 1991 the Sozialistische Partei Österreichs changed it's name to Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs.

Re: Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used

#35

Post by TomK32 »

ninja3925 wrote: post #2

It’s mind boggling how a country can be so rich as to spend millions of manhours on a project and never use it. Maybe we have become too rich as a species.

Or we have become stupid enough to start projects that in the case of nuclear power plants are mostly over budget, over time and with the unsolved long-term problem of nuclear waste. Imagine all that money back then invested into solar research and building wind farms.

Re: Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used

#36

Post by onnimonni »

trailynx wrote: post #27
geek_at wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live a 15 mins drive from Zwentendorf and I can assure you they are used for so much. They have a "Shutdown festival" (rave party), you can go on a tour in the reactor (even go in the main boiler) and it's also often used for movies or small local productions. Also fun fact: The plant is still producing energy but with Solar panels since they plastered the whole yard and the roof of the plant

I did that tour a few years back and it was truly impressive and mesmerising - especially standing in the reactor chamber with all the (empty) rods on top of you (they cut a hole into the wall so you can enter there - and it was never in use, so safe to be in there). Pretty crazy. The whole tour was like entering a time capsule and felt like being in a movie or computer game. Everything looking brand new and unused,…

Damn that sounds like a great visit. It seemed like very interesting piece of history and I wanted to share the link here. I'm driving through Europe right now and wanted to go there but nobody answered my emails and the online reservation form doesn't seem to work. Would you know if they still do it around this time of the year?

Re: Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used

#37

Post by pydry »

TomK32 wrote: post #35
ninja3925 wrote: post #2

It’s mind boggling how a country can be so rich as to spend millions of manhours on a project and never use it. Maybe we have become too rich as a species.

Or we have become stupid enough to start projects that in the case of nuclear power plants are mostly over budget, over time and with the unsolved long-term problem of nuclear waste. Imagine all that money back then invested into solar research and building wind farms.

It wouldnt keep happening were it not for the military wanting to share a supply chain and skills base with a civilian nuclear power industry.

That's why some countries gain and then lose interest in nuclear power as well - e.g. Poland has recently and suddenly gained interest in it because of Russia.

Re: Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used

#38

Post by xyzzy123 »

awesomeMilou wrote: post #32
acidburnNSA wrote: post #31

The one that really breaks my heart is the SNR-300, a cutting-edge liquid metal sodium-cooled breeder reactor capable of unlocking the full potential of the majority isotope (U-238) rather than just the minority (U-235), giving us literally billions of years of current-day whole-earth power from known uranium resources (including seawater and erosion). It was 100% completed and ready to come up to power, but then Che…

I grew up close to Kalkar and visited the theme park that is now located at the power plant a few times as a kid. If you read the timeline, you can see that the protests started before the Chernobyl disaster. At that point, no government entity wanted the reactor to go online. Some of my family members went to protest there when they were younger. Our physics teachers discussed the plant with us on several occasions…

Probably didn't help that for much of the cold war Germany was a likely candidate for "ground zero" of a nuclear exchange. I think living under that might reasonably influence people's attitudes.

Re: Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used

#39

Post by datadeft »

Krasnol wrote: post #6
xeckr wrote: post #3

The irony is that a good chunk of Austria's electricity imports have a nuclear origin. Many of those reactors are a stone's throw away from the border.

There is no irony there at all. Austria, just like many other European countries, are connected to a single grid which has all kinds of energies and where everybody buys on the European Energy Exchange. This grid is what makes the rapid transition to renewable energies possible, and which shows that the base load scare is not more than just one of many FUD tools which aim at slowing down or stopping a transition whic…

> This grid is what makes the rapid transition to renewable energies possible

No, it makes it possible to have nuclear base load plants in Hungary and Bulgaria and few other countries while some small country can play the renewable game at home. Renewables are not something that we can control. This makes them useless without a giant battery or power plants that are possible to scale up and down. The irony is that these power plants are usually gas turbines.

Even something like https://ndb.technology/ has a more serious vision for our energy future, much more serious than the usual we do not need base load just put a solar panel on everything movement largely driven by clueless politicians.

Re: Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used

#40

Post by datadeft »

xeckr wrote: post #8
Krasnol wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no irony there at all. Austria, just like many other European countries, are connected to a single grid which has all kinds of energies and where everybody buys on the European Energy Exchange. This grid is what makes the rapid transition to renewable energies possible, and which shows that the base load scare is not more than just one of many FUD tools which aim at slowing down or stopping a transition whic…

The reliance of the Austrian power grid on nuclear energy, combined with their total refusal to produce it domestically is certainly ironic. This phenomenon also predates any notion of green energy transition by several decades.

At some stage one Austrian politician said that Austria won't buy nuclear contaminated energy from Hungary.
Post reply on HN