Europe’s oldest functioning nuclear reactor, at Switzerland’s Beznau nuclear power plant, is to turn 50 next week — a life span deemed dangerously long by environmentalists, who are demanding that it be shut down immediately.
Commercial operations began at the plant in the northern canton of Aargau, near the border with Germany, on Dec. 9, 1969 — back when The Beatles were still together and a man had just walked on the moon.
Fifty years later, a message in German is printed in white letters on a bright blue wall of the building housing reactor 1: “Anniversary 1969-2019. 355,000 hours of service.”
Photo: AFP
Beznau 1 is one of the very oldest reactors in operation today, after only reactors 1 and 2 at the Tarapur nuclear power plant in western India, which went online in October 1969, according to International Atomic Energy Agency data.
“It’s a privilege to work here,” Michael Dost, director of the plant run by power company Axpo, said during a media tour of Switzerland’s first nuclear plant earlier this year.
He said he was proud to work at such a productive monument of industrial history.
The plant’s two aging reactors (reactor 2 began operating in 1971) together still pump out about 6,000 gigawatts per hour — equivalent to twice the electrical consumption of the nation’s largest city, Zurich.
Showing off a command center with large control panels and colorful buttons reminiscent of the 1960s, Dost said that the plant’s age was not an issue.
“A lot of work has been done here,” he said, adding that “components have been altered and new equipment has been built, so we meet all technical requirements that can be placed on a nuclear plant.”
The Swiss Nuclear Safety Inspectorate (ENSI) said that “Beznau 1 has proven that it fulfills all regulatory requirements thanks to significant equipment updates,” but critics warn that the renovations do not compensate for the reactor’s advanced age.
“I fully acknowledge that large sums have been invested in this plant, but you can’t transform a Volkswagen Beetle into a Tesla just by investing in security upgrades,” Greenpeace Switzerland nuclear expert Florian Kasser said.
The last time the plant was shut for repairs — between 2015 and 2017 — analyses were carried out after flaws were discovered in the steel of the reactor’s pressurized water tanks, Kasser said.
In a finding later confirmed by the ENSI, experts concluded that the flaws were not linked to the operation of the reactor and posed no safety risk, but Greenpeace maintains that the tests did not take into account the effects of radioactivity on the wear and tear of the tank.
Beznau poses “a major risk in terms of nuclear safety,” Kasser said.
The Green Party, which made huge gains in parliamentary elections in October, agrees with that position and has demanded the immediate closure of the plant.
The Beznau plant had become a touchstone of the heated debate about nuclear safety in Switzerland that intensified following the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster in Japan.
In the aftermath of the accident, Switzerland announced plans to phase out nuclear energy and close its four plants, but no clear time line has been set.
In a popular vote three years ago, Swiss rejected a call to speed up the phaseout of the plants by decommissioning all reactors over the age of 45.
“The operational life span of the plants has not been defined,” the Swiss Office of Energy said.
As a result, it said, they could run for as long as ENSI deemed them safe, and as long as the operator found it financially viable to continue investing in the required safety upgrades.
Dost said that he believes Beznau still has much to give.
“We believe we can keep the plant running until about 2030,” he said, acknowledging that after that it might be time to think about retirement.
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