AUGSBURG: The two 160-metre-high cooling towers at the former Gundremmingen nuclear power plant in southern Germany were demolished on Saturday, almost four years after the last reactor was shut down. At 12 noon sharp, the colossal structures, consisting of a total of 56,000 metric tonnes of reinforced concrete, collapsed.
Thousands of onlookers, mainly from the states of Bavaria and neighbouring Baden-Württemberg, watched the spectacular destruction of a symbol of the nuclear age. The demolition went exactly as the demolition company commissioned to carry out the work had planned. There was a time difference of about 15 seconds between the two detonations of the explosives needed to destroy the two towers. The cooling towers each tilted slightly to one side and then collapsed vertically.
The Günzburg district administration had established a large restricted zone for the demolition. The operator, RWE, and the demolition company had been preparing for the operation for more than a year. More than 1,000 holes were drilled into the structures for the explosives. — dpa
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