Stade's 80-metre exhaust stack comes down as dismantling nears the end

Serguey Asael Shinder26 September 2026, 19:502 min read

The 80-metre exhaust stack at the Stade nuclear power plant in Lower Saxony was brought down by controlled explosion in early September, operator PreussenElektra reported, in an account published by World Nuclear News on 25 September. The stack had dominated the site since 1970 and carried the plant's cleaned and continuously monitored exhaust air while it operated. The demolition was carried out by a specialist subcontractor of Freimuth, the company handling the conventional dismantling, after months of planning.

With the stack gone, little of the plant remains visible: the steel sphere of the containment, an office building and disused warehouses. PreussenElektra says the containment is scheduled to be removed by the end of this year. Demolition of the reactor building began on 31 March.

Stade, a 640 MWe pressurised water reactor that started operating in 1972, was the first German plant decommissioned after the 2003 phase-out decision. It ran at reduced capacity until late 2005, when it shut down, and dismantling began in October that year. Conventional demolition of buildings started in 2023; a first phase finished in spring 2024 removed 17 buildings with a volume of about 177,000 cubic metres, and two further phases covering fifteen building complexes have run in parallel since. The site is scheduled to be released from nuclear regulatory oversight in autumn 2027, which would make Stade the first commercially operated pressurised water reactor in Germany to be fully dismantled.

What it means

Stade is the reference case for how long complete decommissioning takes in practice: shutdown in 2005, regulatory release planned for 2027, about twenty-two years in total. That timeline is worth keeping in mind whenever decommissioning costs and durations are estimated for plants elsewhere, including the German units shut down in 2023, which start from a later technical and regulatory baseline but face the same sequence of steps.

The order of work is also instructive. Most of those two decades went into removing the radioactive systems and clearing material for release; the dramatic conventional demolition comes at the very end, once buildings no longer hold anything that requires nuclear oversight. The disappearance of a landmark is therefore a sign that the difficult part is over, not that it is starting - and the remaining milestone that matters is the release from regulatory control, which turns the site back into ordinary land.