SNR-300
The SNR-300 was a fast breeder sodium-cooled nuclear reactor built near the town of Kalkar, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. The reactor was completed but never taken online. SNR-300 was to output 327 megawatts. The project cost about 7 billion Deutsche Mark (about 3.5 billion or over $4 billion). The site is now the location of a theme park, Wunderland Kalkar, which incorporates much of the power plant buildings into the scenery. Background. In France, CEA and EDF had started to build Phénix in 1968, which was powered up in December 1973. It was a pool-type liquid -metal fast breeder reactor cooled with liquid sodium and a small-scale (gross 264/net 233 MW) prototype fast breeder reactor, located at the Marcoule nuclear site, near Orange, France. Phénix had to be stopped for refueling every two months. Between 1990 and 1996, it was run sporadically. When the project for the subsequent full-scale power-plant prototype Superphénix was started in 1986, it was generally felt that no more experimental FBT prototypes were needed. Superphénix, being a prototype reactor, demonstrated reliability issues and had a historical capacity factor of less than 14.4%. Many of these problems were solved  over time, and by 1996 the prototype was reaching its design operational goals. The Russian BN-600 reactor is a similar sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor, built at the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station, in Russia. Designed to generate electrical power of 600 MW in total, the plant dispatches 560 MW to the Middle Urals power grid. It has been in operation since 1980 and represents an evolution on the preceding BN-350 reactor. In 2014, a larger version of the reactor, the BN-800, began operation and reached full commercial operation in August 2016. Planning. In late 1972, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands  charged the Siemens subsidiary Interatom to build a fast breeder. The German government wanted to limit energy import, and a breeder facility was required to use the limited resources efficiently as the uranium supply in Germany was limited. The building commenced at the end of the same year. On 20 May 1975, the Council of the European Communities established the Joint Undertaking 'Schnell-Brüter- Kernkraftwerksgesellschaft mbH' (SBK). At this point neither the country government, nor the local state government (MP from 1978–1998 was Johannes Rau) want the facility to become operational. Plans for a second facility, SNR-2, planned to produce  1,500 megawatts, are officially cancelled around this time.