Austria’s mothballed nuclear plant pulls in the public

Thousands of miles away from the catastrophe in Fukushima, Japan, a mothballed nuclear power station in Austria is attracting a steady stream of visitors.

As Japan grapples with the world’s worst nuclear emergency since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, curious members of the public are wandering past the reactor core of the Zwentendorf station on the banks of the Danube.

But this power plant has never produced a single kilowatt of nuclear power.

Built in 1977 some 40 kilometres west of Vienna, by the village that gave it its name, the plant is one of six nuclear power stations that were to have been built in Austria.

But after Austrians voted to ban atomic energy in a November 1978 referendum, it became one of a kind – and of course it never actually went into operation.

Since it was mothballed, the Zwentendorf power plant has served several different purposes: it has been a primary school, a police barracks, a film set – even a concert venue.

“We get lots of enquiries about nude photo shoots, but we turn them down,” says Stefan Zach, spokesman for EVN, the Austrian power company that runs the station.

Today, its original purpose has made it an invaluable tool for nuclear technicians from neighbouring Germany, who use it as a training centre.

“It’s our contribution to nuclear safety,” says Zach.

And on Friday afternoons, it is open for inspection by the curious visitor – and since mid-2010 some 5,000 people have taken the opportunity to peer down into the bowels of what would have been the nuclear core of the station.

“Watch out things don’t fall out of your pocket as you lean over the reactor core,” says Mr Zach, who runs the tours at the station.

Leaning on the machine that changes the fuel rods, one visitor, Heinrich Kramel, lets his gaze drop down into the abyss of reinforced concrete 40 metres below.

“It makes you feel very small,” he whispers, his white hair hidden under a hard-hat.

Only the panels of flickering lights in the control room fill the phantom ship with any vestige of life.

Two young visitors, Beate and Tomek, have come to see for themselves what their parents helped consign to redundancy in the 1978 referendum – much to the chagrin of the political elite of the time.

They share their parents’ anti-nuclear beliefs.

“People are wrong to believe they can master this energy. Humans are the risk factor,” says Mr Tomek. He pushes a few buttons on a control panel at the plant’s nerve centre: All de-activated.

The nuclear crisis in Japan, sparked when an ageing reactor was hit by a 14-metre tsunami nearly on March 11, is on the mind of every one of the visitors.

As well as a training facility, Zwentendorf has become a source of spare parts for neighbouring Germany’s five atomic power plants of the same design.

It’s not much of a return on the overall cost of the station: construction and maintenance comes to around €1 billion, money which is unlikely ever to be recouped. But in recent years, the plant has at least started to do what it was designed to do: Generate electricity.