Status: 01/01/2023 10:36 a.m
For fear of a power shortage, the last three nuclear power plants will remain connected to the grid until April and thus longer than originally planned. The power plant in Neckarwestheim now has to be made fit for this and has therefore been shut down.
In order to be able to supply Germany with electricity in the coming months, the energy company EnBW has taken the Neckarwestheim 2 nuclear power plant off the grid. It must be made fit for the extended term until mid-April. The 193 fuel elements are to be reassembled during a short shutdown of two to three weeks.
As with previous revisions, according to EnBW, the short standstill will take place under the supervision of the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of the Environment, with TÜV experts accompanying it. More than 500 individual activities are on the program. Around 200 specialists from manufacturers and specialist companies supported the EnBW team.
Up to 1.7 billion kilowatt hours of electricity
After restarting, the pile in the Heilbronn district is expected to produce up to 1.7 billion kilowatt hours of electricity by mid-April. Without the new configuration of the fuel elements, only about a third of this would be possible, explained the head of the nuclear power division, Jörg Michels. “At the same time, we are sticking to our master plan for the dismantling,” says Michels.
Term extension until April 15, 2023
Block 1 in Neckarwestheim went into operation in 1976. In 2011, it was among the first to be shut down after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Unit 2 went online in 1989. Actually, as one of the last three nuclear power plants in Germany, it should have been finally shut down on New Year’s Eve.
However, the energy crisis resulting from the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine made the federal government rethink: The term for Neckarwestheim 2 and the Emsland reactors in Lower Saxony and Isar 2 in Bavaria was extended until April 15. From EnBW’s point of view, a further extension should have been decided long ago in order to be able to implement it technically.