The Nuclear Dream

The peaceful use of nuclear energy was the most momentous utopian technical undertaking in German post-war history and led to one of the country's greatest social conflicts. Although iconic domes and cooling towers have become symbols of this technology, the rest of the nuclear world is practically invisible. Over a period of seven years, Bernhard Ludewig photographed both the buildings and the processes carried out within them - predominantly in Germany but also elsewhere in Europe and in South America. His enlightening images provide a rare glimpse behind the scenes: power plants and open reactors, cooling towers and control rooms, uranium centrifuges and re­positories, research reactors and ­Cherenkov ­ra­diation, construction and demolition. The ­Nuclear Dream reveals a world that is now on the decline in Germany yet once promised an unlimited supply of energy.