On Thursday, Swiss power operator Axpo announced that it will take the Beznau nuclear power plant, which was first switched on 6 September 1969, offline from 2032, reported SRF.
Interest in nuclear energy in Switzerland began shortly after the Second World War. In 1945, Switzerland’s federal government appointed a team led by the physicist Paul Scherrer to look at the new technology. The physicist’s name lives on as the name of Switzerland’s largest research center for natural and engineering sciences, the Paul Scherrer Institute.
At the beginning of the 1950s, the government started enriching several tons of uranium from the Belgian Congo. In 1965, work on building a reactor in Beznau in the canton of Aargau began.
On 6 September 1969, Beznau 1, the first of two reactors went online for a test. On 9 December 1969, the reactor started operating commercially. A second reactor at the same site went into operation in 1972.
The two reactors together produce around 6,000 gigawatt hours of electricity per year, which makes up around 10% of Switzerland’s current power consumption.
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SRF article (in German)
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