Qualla: Rheinsberg Nuclear Power Plant

Rheinsberg Nuclear Power Plant: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For nearly two decades, every East German carried a picture of this place. The ten-mark note of the 1971 series had Clara Zetkin on the front — socialist and campaigner for women's rights — and on the back, a woman engineer at a control console. The console was real. It belonged to the Kernkraftwerk Rheinsberg, a small Soviet-designed reactor set among pine woods and glacial lakes seventy kilometres north of Berlin, and the state was proud enough of it to fold it into the money.

Rheinsberg Nuclear Power Plant: Sixty-Two Megawatts

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The project began in 1956, at the height of the international enthusiasm for atomic power, and construction started on New Year's Day 1960. What went in was a VVER-70 — a Soviet pressurised water reactor, one of the first generation of demonstration plants, the ancestor of a desi...

Rheinsberg Nuclear Power Plant: The Lake Fontane Wrote

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The site sits between two lakes, and one of them is famous. Theodor Fontane, born up the road at Neuruppin, gave his last novel the title Der Stechlin when it appeared in 1898 — a book about an old Brandenburg nobleman and a slowly, reluctantly changing world, named for a lake th...

Rheinsberg Nuclear Power Plant: 1973

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The worst accident in the plant's operating life came in 1973, when a tear opened in tubing in a cooling circuit. It was spotted quickly and repaired, and it was later classified as a level-2 event on the international nuclear scale — an incident, not an accident, well short of a...

Rheinsberg Nuclear Power Plant: Switched Off Before the Country Was

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Rheinsberg had been designed for a twenty-year life, to 1987. Renovation work bought it an extension in 1986, out to 1992. It got neither. On 1 June 1990 the last government of East Germany — three months from ceasing to exist — shut the station down permanently on safety grounds...