Guido Knott has invited the press to the power plant site. The subject of the press conference: the shutdown of the Isar 2 nuclear power plant in just over two weeks, on April 15th. But what the head of the operating company Preussen-Elektra then gives is not just a talk about switching off. It is also a reckoning with politicians, the media and the critics of nuclear power.
He finds it “wrong” to shut down the last Bavarian reactor “in the middle of an energy crisis,” says Knott. That’s why we’re “quarreling shortly before the shutdown” with this decision. He speaks of the “stigmatization” that his people have experienced over the decades and of nuclear energy in general. This is a man speaking who is deeply disappointed. And at some point this man no longer talks about switching off, but about going on. If politicians, “for whatever reason”, think about starting again in the coming months, says Knott, “we will check what is possible”.
But now it is supposed to be switched off in Essenbach near Landshut, on April 15th, after 35 years of power operation, after the plant has produced a total of 404 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in these three and a half decades, supplies arithmetically 3.5 million households and in the meantime twelve percent of the produced total electricity in Bavaria. These are the superlatives that Preussen-Elektra boss Knott uses to illustrate the dimensions. After the Grohnde power plant in Lower Saxony, Isar 2 “generated more electricity than any other plant in the world,” says Knott. “Largely unnoticed by the public.”
The public is always a topic this Wednesday in Essenbach, in Knott’s speech. For the employees, “Kernis was convinced”, it was “completely incomprehensible” that “despite the good results”, despite all the superlatives, the technology had never been properly appreciated. In “ignorance of the facts”, every reportable event was made into an imminent disaster, “what should the citizens get stuck with?” For years, the employees had to justify working in the nuclear power plant and experienced rejection, “not infrequently even friendships were broken because of it”.
“So we’re sending a perfectly healthy 50-year-old into retirement”: Thorsten Faithr (left), Minister of State for the Environment and Consumer Protection, and Guido Knott, Chairman of Preussen-Elektra.
(Photo: Peter Kneffel/dpa)
That is the emotional part of this Wednesday and perhaps the most impressive, because in the past few months the operating companies of the last three German nuclear power plants Isar 2, Emsland and Neckarwestheim have mostly hidden behind diplomatic phrases when someone asked about the feelings of the workforce – or according to whether they would like to let their systems run longer, beyond the spring. You don’t have to decide that, it’s a matter for politics, the statements sounded like this or something similar, sometimes more and sometimes less diplomatic. Knott’s appearance is a bit out of line.
But of course it’s also about the technical side, no less interesting. According to Isar-2 site manager Carsten Müller, the controllers will be shut down on Saturday, April 15th, in order to gradually reduce the output of the power plant until no more electricity is fed into the grid at 11:30 p.m. Then the reactor is shut down and switched off, “there’s this famous red button,” says Müller. That’s the end of it, even though steam will still be rising from the cooling tower for a while on Sunday, April 16th.
There is a job guarantee for everyone at the site until 2029
The end of “a great chapter in Bavaria’s energy history,” said Environment Minister Thorsten Faithr (free voters), who also came to Essenbach. “So we’re sending a perfectly healthy 50-year-old into retirement.” Although, it won’t be quiet after switching off. Then the dismantling begins, which is scheduled to be completed by 2040. The employees will continue to be employed if they want to, until 2029 there is a job guarantee for everyone at the site. He is convinced “that the colleagues who know the plant best are also very suitable to be responsible for the dismantling here”.
By 2040, Essenbach will be decontaminated and the plant will be freed of fuel and water. In the middle of the dismantling process, the cooling tower is to be blown up, which is so characteristic of the region’s landscape, far beyond Landshut. And at the end comes the wrecking ball. “90 percent of the building materials are fed back into the cycle,” says Environment Minister Faithr, who uses concrete in road construction, for example. Incidentally, the dismantling of unit 2 is said to cost 1.1 billion euros, with a further 1.1 billion euros for unit 1, which was shut down after the reactor catastrophe in Fukushima, Japan in spring 2011 and is already being dismantled.
And then when the dismantling is completed at some point? The “green field” that people like to talk about is unlikely to exist. Where the power plant is now, Preussen-Elektra boss Knott wants to locate other energy technologies in the future, he does not specify. So that at least something remains of the Bavarian nuclear age, “certain exhibits” will be given to the Landshut City Museum, says Knott, and talks are also currently underway with the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Or could everything really turn out differently?
It will be “a few more months” before approval is given for the dismantling, says Guido Knott. He keeps the door open: “We would be back within three, six, eight months.” Knott talks about moving on because the journalists asked about it, but Knott is professional enough to know that such statements should not calm the political debate about nuclear power. Especially not in Bavaria, where the CSU and Free Voters have been drumming for months to continue operating the Isar 2 power plant – and where a new state parliament will be elected on October 8th.