New Forms Taschen 195

Pages 206/207 SITE

Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station Decommissioning North Wales. Creat Britain, 1994 (project)

Along with the actual decommissioning of the power plant itself. SITE proposed the construction of an International Energy Communi-cations Center, whose ecologically sensitive form would be inspired by certain layered Neolithic burial mounds known m the region (right). Though probably not a practical solution to the problem posed by old nuclear power plants. this project does draw anention to the dilemma that they pose.

It is interesting to notę that despite the very different location, and the funda-mentally apocalyptic naturę of the problem to be solved, architeas have devised schemes for North Wales that in a way cali on the very distant, in this case Neolithic past. Built by Sir Basil Spence in 1959, the Trawsfynydd complex was then viewed as an impressive monument to a new era of progress and plenty. It is ironie and sig-nificant that 35 years later this ”Brave New World” becomes, on the contrary, a menacing symbol of the dangers of industrial growth. Herbert Muschamp, in The New York Times, put it this way: “Today, after decades of inereasing public aware-ness of ecological issues, a visitor is morę likely to see the twenty-story plant as a monstrous intruder in an Arcadian setting. Nuclear power, so the reasoning went, tapped into the innermost mysteries of naturę. Why couldn't it coexist harmo-niously with forests and lakes? Today, this kind of thinking is recognized as an integ-ral part of cold war propaganda.”³⁶ It would seem highly unlikely that British Nuclear Electric, or indeed other such similar companies elsewhere in the world, would cali on qualified outside architects, let alone ecologically oriented groups such as SITE, for assistance in decommissioning. Most electrical companies prefer to give the impression that there really is no problem. As the London newspaper The Independent has written, however: “By 2010, morę than 50,000 megawatts of cur-rent nuclear plant (the equivalent of 86 Trawsfynydds) will be madę redundant in Britain. Each power station will cost something like £600 million to “decommission"

and about 135 years to lose its lethal potency.”³⁷ It is difficult to judge whether the ”phyto-remediation“proposed by SITE could really significantly alter the normal ratę of absorption of radioactive elements. This is a matter morę for scientists than for architeas. It is certain, however, that blind faith in technological progress has led to extremely dangerous situations, and away from the earthbound wisdom of previous centuries.