Unterweser nuclear power station is an inactive

nuclear power plant A nuclear power plant (NPP), also known as a nuclear power station (NPS), nuclear generating station (NGS) or atomic power station (APS) is a thermal power station in which the heat source is a nuclear reactor. As is typical of thermal power st ...

in Kleinensiel (

Stadland Stadland () is a municipality in the district of Wesermarsch, in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is situated on the left bank of the Weser, approx. 32 km northeast of Oldenburg, and 42 km northwest of Bremen. On the west side Stadland border ...

municipality), near

Nordenham Nordenham () is a town in the Wesermarsch district, in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is located at the mouth (on the west bank) of the Weser river on the Butjadingen peninsula on the coast of the North Sea. The seaport city of Bremerhaven is locat ...

Lower Saxony Lower Saxony is a States of Germany, German state (') in Northern Germany, northwestern Germany. It is the second-largest state by land area, with , and fourth-largest in population (8 million in 2021) among the 16 ' of the Germany, Federal Re ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

. It consists of a single reactor with a nameplate capacity of 1410MW_e, which operated from 1978 until 2011.

History

Construction began on July 1st, 1972, and the power plant was commissioned on September 29th, 1978. At the time of the reactor's commissioning, it was the largest nuclear reactor in the world. It had 193 fuel assemblies. Unterweser was one of the seven reactors shut down on 17 March 2011 (although actual shutdown was several days later, as the nuclear fuel rods take time to cool down) pending the results of a three-month moratorium on nuclear power. On 30 May 2011, the German government announced that Unterweser would not be returning to operation following the moratorium and would be decommissioned. The final fuel rods were removed in February 2019.

Gallery

Image:KKW-Unterweser.jpg, The Unterweser Nuclear Power Plant Image:Niederdruck-Turbinenläufer.jpg, Low-pressure turbine rotor

References

German Documentary
*

Nuclear power in Germany Nuclear power was used in Germany from the 1960s until it was fully phased out in April 2023. German nuclear power began with research reactors in the 1950s and 1960s, with the first commercial plant coming online in 1969. By 1990, nuclear powe ...

Former nuclear power stations in Germany Economy of Lower Saxony {{Germany-powerstation-stub