Vemork

Interesting facts

The power station was designed by the architect Olaf Nordhagen, who also designed the public library in Bergen.

Water from the Møsvatn reservoir dropped about 300 metres through eleven giant pipes to the turbines of the original station.

Vemork's original ten generating sets of 6 megawatts each were supplied by Voith, AEG, Escher Wyss and Oerlikon.

In February 1943 the saboteurs avoided the guarded bridge, climbing down into the gorge, crossing the icy river and entering the plant along a railway track.

The only person the commandos met inside the plant was a Norwegian caretaker, and all ten men of the combined teams escaped afterwards.

The raiders deliberately left a British submachine gun behind so the Germans would blame a British operation rather than take reprisals on local people.

After the raid five of the saboteurs skied hundreds of kilometres across Norway to safety in neutral Sweden.

In November 1943 a force of 143 American B-17 bombers dropped 711 bombs on Vemork, but the great majority missed the plant.

When the ferry Hydro was sunk on Lake Tinn in February 1944, 18 people died, among them 14 Norwegian crew and passengers.

The new power station inside the mountain, opened in 1971, has two turbines with a combined capacity of 204 megawatts, almost double the original plant.

Why it is worth it

Vemork sits on a ledge above a deep gorge outside Rjukan in Telemark, reached across a suspension bridge over the chasm. When it opened in 1911 it was the largest power station in the world, with a capacity of 108 MW, built by the company that became Norsk Hydro to supply electricity for making artificial fertiliser from atmospheric nitrogen, a process developed by the physicist Kristian Birkeland. The construction was so costly that it had to be financed from abroad, and the town of Rjukan grew up almost entirely around the works.

In 1934 a plant at Vemork began producing heavy water, a by-product of hydrogen production that no other factory in the world then made in quantity. During the German occupation of Norway it became one of the most important targets of the Second World War, because heavy water was seen as a route to an atomic bomb. A British glider raid in November 1942 ended in disaster, with the survivors executed. In February 1943 a team of Norwegian commandos working with the British SOE attacked the plant and destroyed the heavy-water section; a year later the resistance sank the ferry carrying the remaining stock across Lake Tinn.

The heavy-water plant closed in 1971, when production moved to a new power station built inside the mountain behind the old one, and in 1988 the historic building became the Norwegian Industrial Workers Museum. Visitors can see the old power station, exhibitions on the industrial town and its labour movement, and the heavy-water cellar where the sabotage took place. Vemork is part of the Rjukan-Notodden industrial heritage, inscribed as a World Heritage site. The story has been filmed more than once, most famously as The Heroes of Telemark in 1965, and in 2026 Vemork was added to the European Film Academy's list of Treasures of European Film Culture.

Getting there

Vemork lies just west of Rjukan in Tinn; the nearest larger town is Kongsberg, about 70 km away. The nearest airport is Kristiansand (KRS), about 190 km away. From the car park by the Vemork bridge, visitors walk about 800 metres uphill to the museum, around 20 minutes by road or path; a minibus can be booked.

From the encyclopaedia

Vemork is a hydroelectric power plant and a museum outside the town of Rjukan in Tinn Municipality in Telemark county, Norway. The plant was built by Norsk Hydro and opened in 1911, its main purpose being to fix nitrogen for the production of fertilizer. At opening, it was the world's largest power plant with a capacity of 108 megawatts (145,000 hp).

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Vemork

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia