No. 78 December 02


The reactor bankruptcy - THTR 300 The THTR Circular
Studies on THTR and much more. The THTR breakdown list
The HTR research The THTR incident in the 'Spiegel'

The THTR Circulars from 2002

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THTR Circular No. 78 Dec. 2002


Hamm Jewish Synagogue Memorial

For years the (meanwhile demolished) light blue tiled toilet facility on Martin-Luther-Straße symbolized the carefree to embarrassing handling of traces of Jewish life in Hamm. In the shadow of the former urinal is the location of the Jewish synagogue, built in 1868 according to a design by I. Lehnhartz in the backyard at 5 Kleine Werlstrasse, demolished in 1938 at the instigation of the Nazi regents in the city of Hamm at the expense of the Jewish community. The Jewish school was also right next door in the front building on the street. A location that was the center of the Jewish community until it was destroyed in the Holocaust.

Only gradually did the citizens begin to work through the memories of this dark chapter in the history of the city of Hammer. The Friends of Nature Hamm persistently campaigned for a worthy memorial and memorial site at the synagogue site and thus achieved the erection of the memorial stone with plaque. Since 1985, the 40th anniversary of the capitulation of the Third Reich, the discussion of this topic began officially.

With the 50th anniversary of the Reichspogromnacht in 1988, the process of coming to terms with and commemorating the Jewish community in Hamm intensified. Numerous articles in the Hammagazin, the publications by Mechthild Brand - for years committed to the traces of the murdered citizens of this city - but also the official invitation of the city to survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants ensured a fundamental reappraisal of the history of the city of Hammer - Even if to this day only the victims of the Nazi terror were the focus, but not the perpetrators and followers who represented the regime in Hamm and who supported the crimes in the first place. The exciting question of why Hammer citizens offered themselves to the brown hordes and incorporated them into the structures of the Third Reich has not yet been answered.

Since the end of the 80s, the city and its citizens have been commemorating the victims of the Holocaust on November 9th, the anniversary of the Reichspogromnacht. At the suggestion of the GRÜNEN, school classes have been helping to shape the commemoration since 2000. As a result of the reappraisal, other aspects of Hammer's Nazi history came into focus: be it the role of the OLG and the lawyers during the Nazi dictatorship (among others through the education community SOAG and the GRÜNEN, foundation of the Arnold Freymuth Society), be it the history and dealings of the Sinti living in Hamm (meritorious here: Mechthild Brand) or the history of the forced laborers (meritorious: Barbara Neuhaus, Heike Kroker).

The war and post-war fallow land, which is still used today as an inner-city parking lot (temporarily), has repeatedly attracted (horror) visions of urban planning. After an urban development competition in 1989 - which provided for the creation of a (greened) town square - the Hamm-Mitte urban development framework plan adopted the results of a previously conducted investor competition, which was supposed to place an underground car park as a counterpoint to the Allee Center.

As is well known, the concentrated anger of the citizens caused the SPD-CDU coalition to give way in order to prevent the impending first referendum in 1996 in the city. All the recent designs had in common that the location of the synagogue was to be integrated into the planning as a memorial.

With the change of government in Hammer Rathaus in 1999, two aspects initiated the further development of the redesign of Santa Monica Square and the associated design of the memorial at the synagogue site: on the one hand, the parking spaces - including the Santa - must be in order to set up the dynamic parking guidance system -Monica Square - can be equipped with barriers and signal loops. On the other hand, the decline of the inner city quarters should be stopped with the help of professional city marketing. Instead of blocking the area with buildings, the Santa-Monica-Platz and the surrounding streets (and squares) should be structurally redesigned and thus allow an "event culture" scope.

Both strands of development were merged in it with a resolution of the council in July 2001 for the expansion plan 12/2001 "Santa Monica Square and Adjacent Streets". At the same time, the redesign of the synagogue site was promoted through an ideas and implementation competition, the result of which was to be an urban-integrated memorial on the area of ​​the former synagogue and the school. Well-known artists, urban and landscape planners were won for this competition: Wilfried Hagebölling Paderborn), Büro Junker and courses with Manfred Jockheck (Dortmund / Hamm), Erich Lütkenhaus with Paul Flender (Hamm), Lützow 7 (Berlin), Ekkehard Neumann (Münster ), Ansgar Nierhoff (Cologne) and the Atelier Schreckenberg Partner with HAWOLI (Bremen).

As part of their lessons, students from secondary Hammer schools should deal with this topic and develop their own suggestions. On November 21, 11.2001, Wilfried Hagebölling's contribution was recognized by the jury as the winning design. The two submitted student contributions were praised.

Hagebölling intends to design the entire property as a memorial in accordance with the task at hand. "The floor plans of the synagogue and the Jewish school have yet to be reconstructed and can at least partially be attested to as remains of the foundations in the ground," said Hagebölling in his explanatory report. And further it says:

From this historical and archaeological evidence, a ground relief is to be worked out that makes the place and its past vivid. The current shape of the property in its strangeness, oblivion and its naive charm, as well as the existing trees, should be included in the redesign.

The floor plans are marked and shaped on different levels by paving, steps and plateaus in the area. The entire property is to be planted in a dense grid with plane trees to form a tree garden, with the existing trees being retained in the new planting as "41st contemporary witnesses".

The square with the floor relief is spanned by the leafy roof of the plane trees and forms a grove in the cityscape, in which the traces of the past are secured. Between three identical double angle pieces made of rusted steel, a core space is explored and defined in the interior of the grove as a new center. Due to the strictness and precise assignment of the elbows to each other, the spatial energies are bundled, condensed and held into a continuum of space, time and silence. This creates a dignified, soulful place beyond all superficial symbols of mourning and solemnity or rhetoric, which with its otherness and specialness reluctantly sets itself apart in the cityscape - a meditative space. (...) Any necessary writing and name boards should be cautiously included as floor panels. "

It is expected that the memorial site will also be completed in spring 2003 with the last northern construction phase. This year's memorial event on November 9th took place for the last time in the shadow of the former toilet facility in front of the memorial stone.

Siegbert Kuenzel 

(Employee of the GREEN council group, advisory member in the committee for urban development and transport, district representative in the Hamm-Mitte district, member of the jury "Memorial at the former synagogue site")

Memorial plaque damaged

About an incident in Hamm's twin town Oranienburg can be read in the "Jüdischen Allgemeine" of November 7.11.2002, XNUMX: "A plaque commemorating the death march was damaged by strangers in Oranienburg. The plaque was knocked over and soiled, the police in Oranienburg announced Furthermore, two concrete flower pots on the memorial plaque had been knocked over. An investigation team had been formed to clear up the crime. " - Something like this happens several times a week in Germany and you can find out about it if you don't just read the WA.

The first issue of

"The Green Hammer"

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The genesis of the "Green Hammer" began at a time when some people gradually began to think about how they deal with nature and their environment. For example, they asked themselves what happens if we continue with our consumption as we have before, or what the consequences of the sharp increase in car traffic will be. These questions were asked by a clear minority in the population. Some people began to organize themselves in citizens' groups to tackle certain grievances and to look for alternatives.

The green hammer - issue no .: 12 of the first series, published by the citizens' initiative

When, after a long preliminary phase, the Hamm citizens' initiative was founded in February 1976 to prevent the second planned nuclear power plant in Hamm (the THTR had been under construction for almost five years), the media reported very little criticism about nuclear power plants. Even on the local pages of the "Westfälischer Anzeiger" (WA) there was extremely inadequate information about our protests and certainly not independent and critical research. The local editorial team of the "Westfälische Rundschau" was a little more open to us. However, the local edition of the WR in Hamm only had a circulation of around 5.000 copies and was given up in 1981.

The sometimes violent clashes about the Brokdorf nuclear power plant in 1976/77 and the terrorist hysteria that began after various RAF actions made a calm, objective discussion with many citizens about the dangers of nuclear power difficult. It turned out that it was often much easier to talk to one another about everyday problems that have to do with the immediate reality of many people's lives. These included, for example, the situation on playgrounds, tree and nature conservation, garbage, energy saving or the traffic situation in Hamm. In the media of the time, these topics were treated very neglected and people who wanted to change something were often enough ridiculed or viciously attacked. For this reason, more than 200 city papers and alternative newspapers were created nationwide. They tried to build a counter-public to the media controlled by powerful industrial and economic interests.

After we had had a number of negative experiences with the local press in Hamm, an editorial group was formed in the citizens' initiative and began to work. That was by no means easy, as nobody had journalistic experience and there was also no distribution network. Since the Green Party did not yet exist at that time, we as a non-partisan citizens' initiative named "The Green Hammer" did not cause any problems.

If the newspaper wasn't going to be a stapled hodgepodge of our press releases and leaflets, we had to change the way we wrote the articles. By expanding the range of topics far beyond the nuclear power problems, contacts arose with other environmental associations, nature conservationists and third world groups, which later turned out to be very useful for further cooperation.

Of course, we didn't have a computer back then, but had to laboriously design the headings with scratch-off letters. The typewriter pages have been scaled down and glued into columns to resemble the layout of a "real" newspaper. No wonder that the production of such an edition and all the trimmings often took several weeks. With the newspaper, we also wanted to address people who had not yet or hardly dealt with our goals. Since the sales at information stands and at events were not sufficient for this, I still remember the bar sales that were carried out in the first three editions. Quite a number of bored counter staff not only bought the "Green Hammer", but also involved us in lengthy discussions and served us a beer, so that we could not get ahead quickly. That was still real basic work!

After three editions, the editorial composition of the quarterly newspaper changed and from then on, Siegbert Künzel was largely responsible for the most part until the end. In the course of time, various smaller shops emerged as sales outlets.

The topics in the "Green Hammer" also had to do with what citizens' initiatives always have to do at the beginning, namely dealing with the difficult planning law and the various channels of authority that play a role in many municipal decisions. A whole series of administrative and council decisions were critically questioned in the articles. It was about protecting ecologically important parts of the landscape on the Lippe, Ahse and Salzbach as well as protecting and maintaining various forests. The road-building mania of various department heads and politicians were countered with arguments and concerns.

Since there was a group in our citizens' initiative that dealt practically with ecological horticulture, this activity was reflected in extensive treatises on vegetable growing and, last but not least, consumer protection. Organic farming was an absolutely exotic topic for most people back then. But the first food scandals were important starting points to make people more sensitive.

In the first issues we reported somewhat more cautiously about our resistance in Hamm in order to slowly introduce readers to this topic. This reluctance was given up after a few issues, because the threatened commissioning of the THTR and the planned construction of further nuclear power plants (for example the construction line 80) made our committed statements urgently necessary. In ongoing episode there were reports about security problems of the THTR, the lengthy processes against the commissioning and the disaster control plan. Even then, contributions on alternative energies, coal refinement or solidarity with Gorleben pointed beyond the narrow framework of a one-point movement.

To be continued in THTR-Rundbrief Nr .: 81!

Horst Blume (Former member of the editorial team of "The Green Hammer")

Research for new nuclear power plants

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On September 13.9.2002th, XNUMX, the Ministry of Economics and Medium-Sized Enterprises, Energy and Transport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia wrote to us in a letter to the THTR, "The development has been aborted as known" and assured us: "The state government supports the federal government in its endeavors to generate to end the electric current from atomic nuclear energy in an orderly manner. "

Now we read on the homepage of Forschungszentrum Jülich that they are working on a further development of the THTR in order to build a new Pebble Bed Modular Reactor in South Africa. This research center conducts research, among other things, on behalf of the NRW ministry that allegedly claims to have "canceled" the development of the THTR. As early as 1997, the red-green state government and the Jülich research center talked their way out of it at a state parliament hearing that the previous nuclear research activities should only make the oh-so-ailing, already existing reactors safer (see THTR RB No. 56, 1997). But now the point is that with the help of a NRW research institute and at least with the tolerance of a red-green state government in another state, where one had to stop in NRW. We quote from the website of Forschungszentrum Jülich:

"The South African EVU ESKOM would like to build a nuclear reactor of the pebble type in South Africa. It is a graphite-moderated, helium-cooled high-temperature reactor.

Such a reactor, equipped with spherical fuel elements, has so far only been built in Germany (Thorium high temperature reactor, THTR in Hamm-Uentrop, Westphalia). Due to its special safety concept, the reactor type is considered to be a future-oriented solution in reactor construction. For this reason, the South Africans are in close contact with Forschungszentrum Jülich, the German company ABB in Mannheim and the English company AEA Technologies in Risley.

The company AEA-Technologies will build the new reactor. Forschungszentrum Jülich was involved in this project because the idea of ​​building a pebble bed reactor originally came from the research center (Prof. Schulten), because the research and development work on the THTR was mainly carried out in the research center Jülich and because the designs for the newer modular versions of this type of reactor were developed in what is now the Institute for Safety Research and Reactor Technology at the Research Center. "

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