A few months ago, I went to Zwentendorf in Austria,
which is a nuclear power plant that was built,
and ready to go, and then cancelled.
And it's now a training centre and accidental museum
because, well, what else would you do
with a never-used nuclear power plant?
- This is Wunderland Kalkar,
it's a theme park opened in 2001.
Each year, we get about 280,000 visitors here in the park.
The Dutch entrepreneur Van der Most, he bought this in 1996.
And from that time on, the first four or five years,
we just put everything out of it and start to rebuild
the whole area to what it is now.
- This was SNR-300, and its story is much the same as Zwentendorf's
It was a nuclear power plant ready to go in Germany
and then public protests and political problems
meant that the whole project was postponed for a long, long while,
and then Chernobyl happened in Ukraine
and the tide of public opinion changed even further,
and the whole project was just cancelled.
The reactor itself, all the valuable stuff in there,
well, that was sold off for parts and for scrap,
but the land, well, that was sold off in the nineties.
- What we've got now is a theme park
with approximately 40 attractions.
Of course there's a carousel, there's the teacups
the elephants, and there's also a very nice
rollercoaster here in the park.
One of the important things we've got
is in the cooling tower, that's the Vertical Swing.
We've got a hotel with a thousand beds,
and we've got a big exhibition hall
with 9,000 square metres where you can have
all kinds of exhibitions.
Two-thirds of the buildings at the moment are still empty.
For example, the building behind us there was the reactor building.
The reactor building, there's nothing in it at the moment,
but we want to make a new landscape in it
with all kinds of wellness area,
but also a kind of winter landscape.
- This is just a small local theme park.
You shouldn't expect hyper-coasters or anything with the polish of Disney,
but they do have one unique ride.
Not because of the ride itself,
that's just an off-the-shelf Star Flyer,
you can ride those a lot of places in the world,
but not inside a cooling tower.
And the view is spectacular.
Oh, I should not have looked down.
I should not have looked down.
Thank you so much to everyone at Wunderland Kalkar.
The season continues for a couple of weeks as this video goes live, and then
they'll be open again next year.