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nationalize the fed

(2,169 posts)
Sun Jun 15, 2014, 09:49 PM Jun 2014

Germany sells guidebooks on renewable energy sites

Guidebooks detailing nearly 200 green projects around the country proves to be a hit with tourists as first edition is sold out

Komila Nabiyeva for Climate News Network, part of the Guardian Environment Network theguardian.com, Wednesday 11 June 2014


Visitors enjoy a ride at the 'Wunderland Kalkar' amusement park, in Kalkar, Germany. It was once the 'Schneller Brueter' nuclear power plant, which was never used, and turned into a hotel and leisure centre. Photograph: Victoria Bonn-Meuser/Corbis

Wind turbines and solar panels: do you love them or hate them? Do you think of renewable energy as the way to a greener future, or an awful blight on the present?

Either way, growing numbers of German communities think they have found a silver lining: they’re touting renewables as tourist attractions. A guidebook is now available, listing about 200 green projects around the country which it thinks are, in the travel writer’s time-hallowed phrase, “worth the detour”. The publication, which has already run to a second edition after the first sold out, was supported by Germany’s Renewable Energies Agency.

Nuclear power stations are not top of every tourist’s must-see list. But the book’s author, Martin Frey, says a nuclear plant in Kalkar, a town on Germany’s border with the Netherlands, is the world’s safest. It pulls in more than half a million visitors annually.

Safe? It should be, because local protests – driven partly by the 1986 Chernobyl accident – meant it never started operation. Now it’s an amusement park offering hotels with all-inclusive holidays, restaurants and merry-go-rounds. Its most popular attraction is a gigantic cooling tower with a climbing wall outside and a carousel inside....
more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/11/germany-sells-guidebooks-on-renewable-energy-sites


The US could have been Germany. Maybe it's not too late. But the latest "URGENT PRIORITY" for the White House is spending >$58 million dollars on Ukraine and sending warships to the Iraq disaster.

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