Passive security system at work. Visit to the Lubmin Nuclear Power Plant

Radio 80s80s is the only station you can actually listen to here,

– we are leaving the grocery shop’s parking lot, in the direction of Lubmin. Laura Branigan’s song “Self Control” is playing in the car.

I know this “that’s the only thing you can listen to here” quite well. May one be simply travelling from one place of nostalgia and retro-tunes to another? Never actually leaving. Certain places, as if caught between the times, unfold their temporalities differently to each visitor. To explore one such spot nearby, our group of doctoral researchers in Greifswald went to the Lubmin nuclear power plant (NPP).

This NPP is a place of historical and contemporary peripeties, a meeting point of different epochs. Our group is very grateful to the tour guide Luisa Behm, who not only confidently and easily took us, a bunch of humanities researchers, through the technical sides of the NPP, but also gave us a glimpse into the multifaceted history and different (self-)images of the plant. The Lubmin NPP was planned to be the largest in the world, and the construction project started in 1967. Units 1–4 were in operation from 1974 to 1990, while the remaining 5–8 were never connected to the grid. Upgrading to the new safety standards in the 1990s was not economically feasible, and a proposal to shut down and dismantle Lubmin NPP was made. At the time, four units were still active, the fifth was under test, and the other three had never been used. – Our group was in one of the latter, the sixth unit.

Decommissioning of units began in 1995. At the time, Lubmin NPP was one of the largest employers in the region: about 10,000 people worked there. The employees came from various countries of the socialist camp, and even today some of them give tours of the places of their past work. These days, Lubmin NPP still employs about 1,000 people.

EWN Entsorgungswerk für Nuklearanlagen GmbH is the company responsible for dismantling and disposing of the nuclear power plants in Greifswald/Lubmin (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania) and Rheinsberg (Brandenburg). As a company that is fully owned by the federal government, the competencies of EWN include radiation protection, dismantling, decontamination, and interim storage. The company is also currently engaged in building up the KONRAD Coordination Office, which task is the final storage management for all radioactive waste which already exists and that which accumulates in the course of EWN dismantling activities. You may learn more about their activities here.

If, according to cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, throughout our lifetime we re-narrativize our lives, frame the experiences in a certain way to make sense of them and, not least, to make them more bearable, then the same thing can happen with large enterprises, where each of the employees carries a piece of its history as well. When a turning point happens and horizons of expectations shift, new stories have to be invented. Such peripeties, altering the usual course of things, happened at least twice in the last thirty years of the Lubmin NPP: with the reunification of Germany, and with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Nuclear power plants built in the times of the FRG and the GDR found their different futures: those built in West Germany are now financed entirely privately, including the process of dismantling, while those in East Germany are financed by the Federal Ministry of Finance.

These days in Lubmin one might also see, or at least look in the direction of, gas pipelines Nord Stream 1 and 2, both inoperative at the time. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the energy supply uncertainty that followed made the German government focus on building liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals to prevent a gas shortage in the country. The first LNG terminal was opened in Wilhelmshaven (Lower Saxony) in mid-December 2022. In the Lubmin area, the LNG terminal Deutsche Ostsee, operated by the private company Deutsche ReGas, functioned from January 2023 until April 2024. During the tour, the members of our group were particularly interested in the current and future plans for the NPP. According to current estimates, the planned deconstruction will extend at least over the 2030s, and possibly the 2060s – “A task for a generation”, we were told.

From previous exchange with my colleagues on visiting historical landmarks and museums in different countries, it seems we agree that often people might come to such places with certain expectations and pre-histories of their own. For instance, depending on the background and experience, one would have different expectations of war-themed or Holocaust museums. To my mind, the inactive power plant – without wanting to over-generalize – might evoke in one’s memory known nuclear accidents, for instance Chornobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. Perhaps also due to its Soviet design, visitors often ask if the Lubmin NPP is the same type as in Chornobyl. The answer is no, they are different.

Nevertheless, the half-built construction sites, if we switch to another radio station with contemporary indie-bands, are not completely out of life here. For example, in September 2019 the Turbinenhalle (turbine hall) of EWN, which is one kilometre long, was among the locations of the MV Festspiele. This part of the festival programme was rightly called “Unerhörte Orte”, which could be translated to English as “unheard-of places” or “outrageous places”. Nils Landgren, Stephan Braun, band Brasssonanz, Kammerchor CONSONO, and Harald Jers have performed there. “Jazz meets choral music, brass meets reinforced concrete”, as was written in the programme of that year.

Passives Sicherheitssystem. Scheduled alarm training tests, each lasting for approximately 10 minutes, are carried out at the station every Wednesday at 15:00. We were not told about it beforehand, so after a quick, calming explanation from the guide, we were able to savor the authenticity of the place. We even got to peek inside the reactor!

We were also told about interesting aspects of routine business at the NPP: for example, the checkpoints and the washing of the protective clothing in the Netherlands, the “trendy” brown suits for women, and personal dosimeters. As we were going through the emergency exit, a question arose: “What emergency scenarios had happened here?” Although there had been a cable fire in 1975, there were no big accidents at Lubmin NPP.

After our visit, we stopped by Lubmin beach and then had a nice get-together at Greifswald’s harbour in the evening.

Turning points, happening simultaneously on collective and individual levels, due to the lag of human perception, easily lend themselves to allegorization. The juxtaposition of melancholic pop-music from the 1980s and the news report on the radio, which does not yet know it is the harbinger of tragedy, brings us back to the poetics of ancient Greek drama. Though reactor shutdowns would probably not be regarded as a catastrophe, on the way back I’m wondering: what was playing on the radio then?

If you’re lost, you can look and you will find me / Time after time
If you fall, I will catch you, I will be waiting / Time after time

Fading out is the broadcast of this day.