Wunderland Kalkar
In 1972, construction on what was going to be Germany’s first fast breeder reactor, SNR-300, began in North Rhine-Westphalia. The reactor was designed to use plutonium as fuel, be cooled by sodium, and output around 327 megawatts of energy. At the time, fast breeder reactors were still a very new and strange technology, but Germany was determined to limit importing energy and, since the uranium supply in the country was very limited, a breeder facility to use the limited resources as efficiently as possible was required.
In 1979, disaster struck at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, causing one of its two reactors to experience a partial meltdown. By that time, public protests of the facility in Germany reached new heights, but despite the opposition, construction continued and the facility was completed in 1985. By that time, roughly USD $4,000,000,000 had been spent on the facility. In 1986, disaster struck again, this time at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. One of its 4 completed reactors exploded, underwent a total meltdown, and spewed radioactive waste across Europe for 10 days while its graphite moderators were on fire. Following this disaster, SNR-300 never came online and the project was officially cancelled in 1991.
Completely unused, the facility was considered one of the most expensive and complicated pieces of trash in the world. A Dutch investor purchased the grounds, reportedly for USD $3,000,000,000. He left the reactor building where it was, and built an amusement park around it. On the outer face of its cooling tower is a climbing wall, and a swing ride is housed within the cooling tower. Wunderland Kalkar receives around 600,000 visitors per year.










