To stand underneath a nuclear reactor is a rare, unnerving experience. In the control-rod drive chamber at the Kruemmel nuclear power plant near Hamburg, where spars of boron carbide and hafnium are pushed upward into the reactor to regulate the fission of uranium nuclei that happens a few metres above, everything is dead quiet.
"This room is normally filled with nitrogen gas instead of air to prevent fire," the engineering guide from plant operator Vattenfall calmly explains. "If the reactor was on, we wouldn't be in here," she says about the plant, which, rated at 1,400 megawatts is the largest of its type in the world.
The fact that the plant is currently switched off goes a long way to explaining the intensity of the nuclear-energy debate in Germany - and what is at stake for the industry as the world meets next week at the climate conference in Copenhagen. On July 4, a transformer fault at the plant caused an automatic shutdown - the second serious disruptive fault with this section of the plant in two years. The media, and the public, howled with anxiety and distrust.
The plant has now been temporarily mothballed to allow the complete rebuilding of the transformer facility - a move motivated more by public relations than by engineering necessity, Vattenfall's public relations staff admit. At the same time, the German government is about to create a law lengthening the service of the country's 17 nuclear plants - in the face of furious opposition from a well-organised anti-nuclear movement and a slim majority of the general public.
This new lease of life for Germany's nuclear industry, which had been faced with total shutdown by 2020 under a law agreed by a previous Green-Social Democrat government, dovetails with a general renaissance for nuclear energy around the world. The reason is that nuclear power - for all the horrifying hypotheses of reactor meltdown - is now billed as a climate-friendly technology, as it produces almost no carbon dioxide from the generation of electricity.
As a result the World Nuclear Association, an industry lobby group, argues that if the world is to attain a 70 per cent cut of greenhouse gases below 2000 levels by 2050, 27 times more nuclear capacity than is presently operating will be required. In Germany at least, such a scenario seems highly unlikely. The Kruemmel power plant stands as a symbol for the risk that things can and do go wrong with nuclear energy.
"There is no nuclear power plant world-wide that is 100 per cent secure. In every one of these it can come to a core meltdown," says Jochen Stay," an activist who is part of Germany's broad-based anti- nuclear movement. "It's not something that happens every day, but when it does happen the consequences are huge.
And in a densely populated country like Germany the consequences would be much greater than in a relatively sparsely populated place like Chernobyl," he says, referring to the disastrous 1986 reactor meltdown in Ukraine. The fear of reactor disaster couples with the as-yet unfruitful search for a final storage solution for nuclear waste.
The emergence in August of the fact that previous German governments had suppressed evidence that their favoured storage site was unfit for the purpose did nothing to foster public trust in nuclear power. Nevertheless, the policy of the new government is that Germany will "use nuclear power as a 'bridge technology' until it can be reliably replaced by renewable energy," according to Volker Kauder, parliamentary leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats.
The country's plants will now run until at least the end of their natural lifetime in around 2030. According to a poll published in October by broadcaster ZDF, 52 per cent of the public were against such a move. There is no discussion - yet - of building any more plants. Pragmatists like the German government argue that nuclear, as a low-carbon technology, should be used as one of a variety of ways of mitigating climate change until wind-power and other renewable technologies catch up.
However, Professor Manfred Fischedick, one of Germany's top climate scientists, rebuffs this argument. Extending the service of nuclear plants creates the "danger that important changes in the direction of renewable energy - such as decentralising power infrastructure and higher energy efficiency - are prevented or at least slowed down," he says.
The engineers and managers at Kruemmel are hoping that their plant will be up and running again, playing its part in helping Germany reach its carbon-reduction targets, by the end of January, by which time a Copenhagen deal may, or may not, have given a clearer picture of the road ahead for the industry. Convincing the public of nuclear power's climate credentials will be a steeper climb.
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