West Germany’s first commercial nuclear power plant goes into operation on the Lower Main
Observing how the United States and the Soviet Union were using nuclear power to generate electricity in the 1950s, the West German government decided that it too could use this new form of energy production. As the energy companies were reluctant to engage with such a new and complicated technology and the government was so enthusiastic about doing so, many observers concluded that West Germany intended to use the civil technology to develop nuclear weapons. The first German research reactor was completed in 1957. Built on the Isar River in Garching near Munich, its success led to the construction of a second experimental nuclear power plant in Kahl on the Lower Main River. Commissioned on 13 November 1960, the plant in Kahl started feeding electricity into the public grid some six months later. In the following decades, a total of 37 nuclear power plants were in operation in West Germany. The first of the two nuclear power plants built to supply electricity to the DDR was constructed near Rheinsberg, between Nehmitz and Lake Stechlin, and began operating in 1966.
The Kahl plant was shut down after 25 years of operation and dozens of defects and incidents. It took longer to dismantle than it had been in operation and was also significantly more expensive to demolish than it had been to construct. The Rheinsberg nuclear power plant was shut down in 1990, and decommissioning began five years later. Work is expected to be completed by the middle of the 21st century. After much political debate, and influenced by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the last German nuclear power plants were shut down in 2023.
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