The Isar 2 power plant in Essenbach, southern Germany, on the 14th. CHRISTOF STACHE / AFP
On the edge of a busy side street, the Gasthaus-Restaurant Am Kraftwerk (“A la centrale”) offers invigorating Bavarian cuisine at unbeatable prices. It also benefits from the direct view of the Isar 2 nuclear power plant, less than 600 meters away, which has given its manager Richard Tanneberger unbeatable weather conditions. “Thanks to the plume of steam coming out of the plant, I can tell you what the weather will be like: if it rises vertically, good weather is guaranteed; if he moves to the side, there are disturbances,” assures the fifty-year-old, before adding: “Luckily you came today, because Saturday [15 avril], when the factory has closed, the cloud is no longer there and I can no longer predict the weather. »
Also read: Article reserved for our subscribers Germany says goodbye to its last nuclear power plants
Like the other two nuclear power plants that are still in operation, Emsland (Lower Saxony) and Neckarwestheim 2 (Baden-Württemberg), Isar 2 must also be finally shut down this Saturday evening. Among local residents, Richard Tanneberger isn’t the only one to say that the disappearance of his plume will “create a vacuum.” Josef Klaus agrees. When the plant opened in 1988, he wouldn’t have said that. “I had just moved into a house on the hillside. The view was beautiful and overnight I found myself with this huge cloud in front of me. At first I found it very annoying, but I got used to it very quickly,” says the former bank employee, who has been mayor of Niederaichbach, a town of 4,000 in the immediate vicinity of the plant, since 2014.
Also read: Nuclear power: a desirable German pragmatism
If Josef Klaus has “got used” to the famous cloud, that is also because he has seen everything that brought the plant back to his community. “In a few years we have received up to 4 million euros in trade tax, which means that we can carry out many projects debt-free today. And then there’s the impact on employment: it takes dozens of workers and employees to build and then operate a plant. That gave jobs to a lot of people who would otherwise have gone elsewhere,” explains the elected CSU deputy in Bavaria, who has a large photo of the plant hanging in the middle of one wall of his desk.
“By pure ideology”
For these reasons, Josef Klaus considers April 15 to be “a very sad day”. Not that he’s worried about Isar 2’s 450 employees, whose contracts are guaranteed until 2029 and many of whom can hope to keep their jobs beyond that date, as the decommissioning of the facility doesn’t have to be completed until 2039. “More than employment, the topic of energy supply concerns me the most. That’s why I say a sad day. I don’t understand why we stop power plants that work perfectly and emit very little CO2, while electricity prices are skyrocketing and we have to do everything we can to fight global warming,” regrets the mayor of Niederaichbach.
You still have 53.04% of this article to read. The following is for subscribers only.