The Destruction of a Nuclear Plant

Article Frontispiece.

Reactor, digital photographic print on plastic canvas, 330 × 230 cm, from the Lemóniz Nuclear Plant project, 2002–2004. (© Marisa González) The monumental façade of one of the two reactors is reminiscent of a Renaissance cathedral.

This project is a record of the dismantling of a nuclear power plant. It reveals the contradiction between the monumental and dangerous industrial site and its location in a natural seaside paradise (Fig. 1). This digital-technology work, still in progress, was created by means of long hours of video and photographic recordings and uses countless objects rescued from the nuclear plant in Bilbao, which is still being dismantled.

My interest in industrial archaeology and its inherent concerns—memory and oblivion, architecture, planning and their social and cultural resonances—is manifest.

Spain’s Lemóniz Nuclear Plant was built in the 1970s, some 20 miles outside of Bilbao, on a steep and vast coastal plot. This overwhelming and controversial industrial macro-complex was never opened. Nevertheless, the two cylindrical monumental buildings housing the reactors, the turbine chamber and the whole accumulation of facilities around the nuclear reactors have become an essential document of late-20th-century industrial archeology.

The plant’s elaborate and extended building process involved thousands of people and employed the most diverse and sophisticated techniques and the most advanced technological innovations of the day. However, the reactor (Fig. 2) waited for uranium that never reached its destination due to the ultimate cancellation of the project by the Spanish authorities for political reasons.

Fig. 1.

Landscape, digital photograph on aluminum, 90 × 135 cm, from the Lemóniz Nuclear Plant project, 2002–2004. (© Marisa González) Multiple barbed-wire fences traverse the hills surrounding and concealing the nuclear plant.

There were strikes, public protests and terrorist murders, all of which rendered completion of the macro-project unworkable. Access to the nuclear plant over the years has been greatly restricted by extreme security measures. I consider my multiple visits to the plant, with the purpose of documenting what goes on inside, a true revelation, as well as a privilege, due to the caution and opacity that usually surrounds the functioning of nuclear plants in general and this one, sleeping through time, in particular.

Approaches to Lemóniz Nuclear Plant

My primary approach to Lemóniz, which is probably the most critical one, tries to present this plant as a monster generated by a dream characteristic of scientific or, more accurately, techno-scientific reasoning—a frightening, barren creature, much like the enormous skeleton of an impossible chimera stranded on a deserted and alien beach in its overwhelming vegetal splendor, in its disturbing uselessness.

My secondary approach is framed within the most orthodox line of modern art and stresses not so much the contents as the formal and material qualities of the manifold technical devices actually assembled in the plant itself, with the aim of generating sensory spaces evoking my experiences as an artist in the plant’s interior.

The tertiary one, more historical and documentary, attempts an imaginary reconstruction of what this overwhelming nuclear energy generator was or was intended to be.

My first visual inspection, as I entered the deserted and monumental spaces of the plant, took place in January 2002, during the first phase of its dismantling. I witnessed the destruction, by means of controlled fire, of the sophisticated high-precision technology custom built for these premises. I also discovered the constant presence of water, carried through a complex network of pipes hidden beneath the ground that goes through all areas of the plant, much like the veins and arteries in our bodies.

The fierce sea delimits and attacks the plant, which protects itself with an incredibly long wall cordoned off by means of barbed wire fences and security cameras (Fig. 3). Of the original security measures, hardly any are still active, with those remaining being noticeable through the constant presence of innumerable security cameras, endless danger signs warning of the risks posed by toxic and...