Nuclear Power Plant Landshut Isar I + Isar II
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Next to the Isar river, two base load nuclear power plants have been built, called Isar I and Isar II. They are fourteen kilometres away from Landshut, between Essenbach and Niederaichbach.
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[edit] Safety
[edit] Passive Safety Features
Consequentially shielding: The safety feature begins with the so-called “passive safety feature” which includes the radio-active materials in the reactor core (also by accidents) to protect them from the outside environment. Safety in- and outward: Fuel pellets, Fuel-Rod casings, reactor pressure vessel, biological shield, steel containment structure and the outer ferro concrete mantle are six of the most important passive safety features.
[edit] Active Safety Features
The passive safety installations are supplemented by a lot of automatically working “active safety systems” whose reliableness is based on their plural existence and their autonomously working in separate rooms. This is as necessary for the internal electric power supply as for the reactor cooling system, which guarantees the reliable thermal dissipation in every operating status, even when an implausible accident ingresses (for example a break of a primary coolant line). It constantly controls and compares all the important key operating parameters of the plant and activates automatically the necessary protection measures (independent from the plant operating personnel) if a parameter reaches a limit value. For example the protection system may initiate a rapid shutdown and aftercooling procedure.
[edit] The Future
[edit] On-site storage facilities
By law, all nuclear power plants are forced to store their atomic waste in on-site storage facilities near the power plant. These temporary storage facilities have to be used until a final processing plant is built in a central location in Germany, to where all nuclear power plants would bring their atomic waste to. The usage of this storage is planed from 2030 onwards, so interim storage facilities are necessary. The nuclear power plants Isar must also therefore have its own temporary storage facility, which has been under construction since the 15 June 2004. Because of dangers caused by atomic energy (insanitary nuclear radiation etc.), environmentalists and people living near Isar I+II boycott the start of construction. E.ON started to build up the storage facility, although many people sued. By plan, the interim storage facility of Isar I+II should be finished in the first half of the year 2006 and can be used from then on.
[edit] Phasing-out of nuclear power
Since the catastrophic accident of Chernobyl in the year 1986, the public image of Nuclear power has become stained and many people doubt in the ability to operate those plants without any greater security risks. Although German nuclear power plants do operate under the highest security standards, nobody can guarantee that there will never be an accident in Germany with worst consequences. A new law, concerning nuclear power, was passed on the 26th April 2002. It is called "Gesetz zur geordneten Beendigung der Kernenergienutzung zur gewerblichen Erzeugung von Elektrizität". Rather than promoting nuclear power, it has instead sealed its fate. The main idea of this law is that no more new nuclear power plants will be built up and the regular runtime of each existing plant is limited to 32 years from start-up onwards. Because Isar I was finished in 1977, it will be finally shut down in 2009. Isar II was finished in 1988 and so its final shutdown will be in 2020.
[edit] Notes
- Note 1: This article was written by some students from the University of Applied Sciences Landshut. It was not written by E.ON Nuclear Energy!
- Note 2: The writters are not responsible for any changes. We wrote this article in an objective way, we beg you not to change this point of view!
