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Huge lake in NRW: Billions of liters of water from the Rhine are to be diverted

2022-12-04T04:16:00.821Z


Huge lake in NRW: Billions of liters of water from the Rhine are to be diverted Created: 04/12/2022 05:04 By: Peter Seven The second largest lake in Germany is to be created in the Hambach opencast mine between Cologne and Aachen. Environmentalists say: This is a problem. ©RWE The second largest lake in Germany is to be created in the RWE Hambach opencast mine. But that is not feasible at all,


Huge lake in NRW: Billions of liters of water from the Rhine are to be diverted

Created: 04/12/2022 05:04

By: Peter Seven

The second largest lake in Germany is to be created in the Hambach opencast mine between Cologne and Aachen.

Environmentalists say: This is a problem.

©RWE

The second largest lake in Germany is to be created in the RWE Hambach opencast mine.

But that is not feasible at all, say environmentalists and warn of a risk.

Cologne – It takes a lot of imagination to imagine that there will ever be life here again.

Standing on the edge of the RWE Hambach opencast mine, you can see a landscape like something out of an end-of-the-world film: a grey-brown crater surface that stretches for kilometers to the horizon.

A gigantic nothing.

Ironically, the second largest lake in Germany is to be created here.

But the mammoth project could become a real risk and cannot be implemented in the planned form, environmentalists say to 24RHEIN.

Amount of water for the planned Hambacher See

3.6 billion cubic meters

area of ​​the lake

4200 hectares (equivalent to almost 6000 soccer fields)

depth

400 meters

When is the lake formed?

Embankments are being prepared, flooding from 2030

Hambacher See in NRW: Only Lake Constance is larger

RWE has been mining lignite in Hambach since 1978, it is the energy company's largest opencast mine.

This will end in 2029 due to the statutory phase-out of coal, 15 years earlier than originally planned.

This also means that the recultivation of the site in the Rhenish lignite mining area has started ahead of schedule: a 400 meter deep lake with an area of ​​4,200 hectares is planned between Cologne and Aachen.

An area the size of almost 6,000 soccer fields.

This figure is at least as impressive: the lake will hold 3.6 billion cubic meters of water.

This roughly corresponds to the amount of water that all 18 million inhabitants of NRW together consume within four years.

Only Lake Constance has a larger volume in this country.

Enormous amounts of water are to be taken from the Rhine

RWE intends to take the huge amounts of water required from the Rhine near Dormagen and direct it to the opencast mine.

“It would take too long for the groundwater to rise again and fill the hole.

That's why we need water from the Rhine," explains RWE spokesman Guido Steffen.

The company estimates that it will take around 40 years for the lake to be completely filled.

"That's nonsense," believes Dirk Jansen from the Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation Germany (BUND) NRW.

Due to climate change, the Rhine will carry significantly less water, especially in summer.

"Some experts even assume that the river will dry up temporarily in the summer months, so you can no longer divert it," says Jansen.

"The way RWE envisions it cannot be implemented." Even if, as climate researchers predict, there will be more heavy rainfall in the future, it will be at least 80 years before the Hambacher See deserves the name lake.

Hambach opencast mine in North Rhine-Westphalia: heavy metals, sulphites and other substances in the groundwater

Another problem from the point of view of the environmentalists: the water itself. "We demand that the Plörre from the Rhine is not washed uncleaned into the landscape," says Jansen.

The Rhine water is too heavily polluted to be used for renaturation.

Even the rising groundwater will contain heavy metals, sulphites and other pollutants because of the opencast mine.

"The water quality has been spoiled for centuries, we know that from other open-pit lakes.

To fill up here with water from the Rhine of all things would be fatal,” says Jansen.

Hambach mine is to become the largest lake in North Rhine-Westphalia

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RWE even violates the EU Water Framework Directive.

According to the Directive, all Member States are obliged to bring all water bodies into good ecological status by 2015 and in exceptional cases by 2027.

This means that the status of water bodies should be improved as far as possible, but must not be deteriorated under any circumstances.

"From our point of view, however, RWE is violating the ban on deterioration with the plan," says Jansen.

RWE: Manheim Bay is “no alternative”

But the criticism goes further.

Above all, the planned so-called Manheim Bay will become an environmental risk for the region.

According to RWE plans, there should be a bulge in the southeast of the lake as far as the former Kerpen district of Manheim.

"There is no alternative," said RWE spokesman Guido Steffen.

In order for the banks of the lake to be stable, they should be significantly flattened.

According to RWE, more than 700 million cubic meters of soil are required for this.

In order to arrive at this amount, one would have to excavate the bay, covering an area of ​​600 hectares.

The material is also to be used to recultivate another area of ​​the opencast mine.

"That's absurd.

They want to excavate 600 hectares of ancient cultivated land in order to fill it in somewhere else,” complains Dirk Jansen.

In the area of ​​the planned bay not only strictly protected bird species live, whose habitat will be destroyed.

The forest areas would also be torn apart by the bay, and no coherent biotope could develop.

Ironically, the ecosystem in the Hambach Forest, which was saved from deforestation after years of dispute, will suffer severely.

"You just pull through the old boot that you thought up in the 1970s instead of simply rethinking flexibly," says Jansen.

BUND NRW: "RWE has chosen the cheapest way"

He believes: "RWE has not chosen the ecologically sensible way, but simply the cheapest." In addition, the group makes a lot of money through the RWE subsidiary RBS Kies with mined gravel, which is sold instead of using it to stabilize the open pit use.

RWE spokesman Guido Steffen does not accept that.

"There are other companies involved in the excavations, not just our subsidiary." He says: "The BUND NRW would prefer it if we built a fence around the opencast mine and didn't do anything with the site." In fact, that is According to the BUND, a theoretical alternative is to leave opencast mining completely to nature and not to intervene.

But that's completely unrealistic, according to Guido Steffen: "It's not a small gravel pit." One has had good experiences with opencast lakes.

"It's getting a lot of acceptance, and that's what communities want."

It is still unclear how the lake will one day be used in concrete terms.

But there are already ideas:

  • The lake becomes a local recreation area between Cologne and Aachen, with a bathing area and beach as well as restaurants.

  • The lake could also serve as a storage facility for electrical energy: With the help of pumps, water could be pumped up from the remaining hole of the opencast mine and then drained down again by turbines when electricity is required.

  • A large floating solar park could also float and produce electricity on the huge surface of the lake.

RWE is already planning solar systems on the embankments in advance.

A system with an output of twelve megawatts is to be built near Elsdorf on a several kilometer long shoulder of the opencast mine.

This is to generate green electricity.

The group also wants to build a connection from the Sophienhöhe spoil heap to the planned Hambacher See.

(pen) Tip: Fair and reliable information about what's happening in NRW - subscribe to our free 24RHEIN newsletter here.

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2022-12-04

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