WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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A few months ago, I went to
Zwentendorf in Austria,

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which is a nuclear power
plant that was built,

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and ready to go, and then cancelled.

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And it's now a training
centre and accidental museum

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because, well, what else would you do

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with a never-used nuclear power plant?

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- This is Wunderland Kalkar,

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it's a theme park opened in 2001.

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Each year, we get about 280,000
visitors here in the park.

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The Dutch entrepreneur Van der Most,
he bought this in 1996.

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And from that time on,
the first four or five years,

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we just put everything out
of it and start to rebuild

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the whole area to what it is now.

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- This was SNR-300, and its story
is much the same as Zwentendorf's

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It was a nuclear power plant
ready to go in Germany

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and then public protests
and political problems

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meant that the whole project
was postponed for a long, long while,

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and then Chernobyl
happened in Ukraine

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and the tide of public opinion
changed even further,

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and the whole project was just cancelled.

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The reactor itself, all the
valuable stuff in there,

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well, that was sold off
for parts and for scrap,

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but the land, well, that was
sold off in the nineties.

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- What we've got now is a theme park

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with approximately 40 attractions.

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Of course there's a carousel,
there's the teacups

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the elephants, and
there's also a very nice

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rollercoaster here in the park.

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One of the important things we've got

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is in the cooling tower,
that's the Vertical Swing.

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We've got a hotel with a thousand beds,

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and we've got a big exhibition hall

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with 9,000 square metres
where you can have

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all kinds of exhibitions.

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Two-thirds of the buildings at
the moment are still empty.

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For example, the building behind us there
was the reactor building.

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The reactor building,
there's nothing in it at the moment,

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but we want to make a new landscape in it

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with all kinds of wellness area,

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but also a kind of winter landscape.

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- This is just a small local theme park.

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You shouldn't expect hyper-coasters
or anything with the polish of Disney,

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but they do have one unique ride.

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Not because of the ride itself,

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that's just an off-the-shelf Star Flyer,

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you can ride those a lot
of places in the world,

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but not inside a cooling tower.

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And the view is spectacular.

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Oh, I should not have looked down.

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I should not have looked down.

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Thank you so much to everyone
at Wunderland Kalkar.

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The season continues for a couple of weeks
as this video goes live, and then

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they'll be open again next year.