Såheim Power Station

Rjukan is a company town squeezed into the bottom of a narrow valley so deep that the sun does not reach it from roughly September to March, and the building that best explains why the town exists is the Såheim power station. Locals call it "the Opera", and the nickname is fair: this is one of the most monumental industrial buildings in Norway, a long stone-faced block with a tower, columns and round arches borrowed from the architecture of palaces and churches rather than factories. It was designed from 1912 by Thorvald Astrup, who became Norsk Hydro's house architect for decades, together with Olaf Nordhagen, and it housed under a single roof both the turbine hall and the great furnace halls where electricity was turned into fertiliser.

The station was the second great step in harnessing the Måna river, which drops from the lake Møsvatn through the Vestfjord valley. Water that had already passed through Vemork upstream was carried to Såheim through a tunnel almost 5.7 km long, begun in January 1912; construction of the station itself started in 1914, and it was formally put into service in January 1916. Its electricity fed the Birkeland-Eyde process, in which an electric arc fixed nitrogen from the air to make nitrate fertiliser, and it powered Norsk Hydro's production in Rjukan until the late 1920s, when Norsk Hydro switched to the Haber-Bosch process. Nitric acid continued to be made on the site until 1991.

Såheim still produces power. The eleven original generating sets were replaced in 1959, 1961 and 1973 by three large Francis turbines with a combined capacity of close to 190 MW, fed by a head of about 270 metres. The exterior, the turbine hall and its historic equipment were protected by the national heritage authority in 2003, and the station is part of the Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site, inscribed by UNESCO in 2015 as a landscape that shows how hydropower built a modern industrial society. Part of the old furnace building has found a new life as a sports hall. Seen from the valley floor, with the steep forested slopes rising behind it, the grand façade makes the ambition of those early industrialists very tangible.

Getting there

Såheim stands in Rjukan, in the municipality of Tinn in Telemark; the town of Kongsberg is about 64 km away as the crow flies. Rjukan is about 175 km from Oslo, a drive of roughly two and a half to three hours, and buses run from Oslo bus terminal with a change at Notodden. The nearest airport in a straight line is Kristiansand (KRS), about 190 km away, but most travellers arrive via Oslo. The Vemork power station, now the Norwegian Industrial Workers Museum, lies a short way up the valley and makes a natural companion visit.