Dukovany & My Father
This story happened 10 years ago. My memory is a bit blurry, but thankfully we now carry entire archives in our pockets, so old photos help fill in the gaps.
My father – and generations of his family before him – came from a small village called Dukovany. The village itself is not particularly remarkable – just a classic Czech settlement with around a thousand inhabitants. In Czechia, you can find villages like this every 40 minutes of walking from one another. As people who heard my previous story already know, the scale of distances in Europe is much smaller. You really cannot get lost.
In the 1970s, the Soviets, together with the Czechoslovak government, decided to build a nuclear power plant on Czech soil. Together with the plant, they also built the Dalešice and Mohelno reservoirs because nuclear plants require enormous amounts of water. Fun fact – those massive “chimneys” you see at power plants are not actually producing pollution. They mostly release water vapor. They are cooling towers, designed to disperse the huge amount of leftover heat generated by the reactor.
So when the plant was completed in 1985, suddenly the little village of Dukovany became famous.
Both positively and negatively.
Positively, because residents of nearby villages got cheaper electricity.
Negatively, because just a year later, the Chernobyl disaster happened, and people became terrified of radiation. Growing up, my parents told me endless jokes about locals being able to see in the dark.
The irony was that because of the extremely strict environmental monitoring around the plant, the surrounding nature actually flourished. Wildlife and vegetation boomed in ways you would not easily find in many other parts of Czechia.
Anyway.
Childhood
As a child, I spent many summers in the fields and forests beneath the shadow of the plant. Together with my siblings, I played near the railway tracks occasionally used by trains delivering fuel, and around the Jihlava River.
Years later, I lived in Prague with a good friend named Jan. We lived together in a shared community flat called Techsquat, where we were building, scaling, and terminating startups. Honestly, this could be a story of its own.
One summer, I invited him to see the place where my father grew up – the village where I spent part of my childhood, the nuclear plant, and, to make things more interesting, a nearby hydrometeorological tower – or mast, to be precise.
I do not know when I got the idea that simply because my father came from this village, I somehow had the right to climb any functioning infrastructure nearby. But somehow, both of us agreed that – legally or illegally – we were going to climb it.
For memes, of course.
Our father knew a guy who could open the gate at the base for us, so the plan was set for one weekend.
When we approached the tower – and yes, the mast was visible from very far away – we noticed different sound frequencies being emitted from the base station.
At the gate, we got our first surprise. The guy my father had promised us was sick, and instead there was a different worker who definitely did not share our excitement about climbing the tower.
We spent a long time trying to convince him that, because we had come all the way from Prague, he simply could not reject us.
In the end, he agreed on one condition. He told us that if we felt ourselves falling while climbing, we should leap away from the mast so we would land in the nearby wheat fields instead of inside his station grounds – so technically, we would no longer be his problem.
The mast was 135 meters tall – about 10 meters taller than the cooling towers of the nearby nuclear power plant.
It was a sunny day – no rain expected, no strong wind – basically perfect conditions for climbing a tower.
The Climb
We started.
During the climb, I quickly realized how hilariously underprepared we had been. Yes, the tower had ladders, but somehow nobody tells you that the metal bars are really not enough to call something “climbable.”
What did we bring? Gloves.
What did we forget? Everything else.
No water, no sugar, no snacks, no sunscreen, no hats, no harnesses – just two naive Czech guys genuinely believing this was a normal way to spend a weekend afternoon.
To be fair, at that time I was doing a lot of urban exploring – wandering through abandoned factories and unfinished hotel construction sites – but I had definitely underestimated this one.
About halfway up, Jan and I became completely exhausted. We quickly realized that climbing mostly with our arms was unsustainable, so we changed our technique and started relying much more on our legs.
Slowly, meter by meter, we continued.
It took us around 45 minutes to reach the top.
But we made it.
The view was incredible. The mast was anchored to the ground with massive support cables, but even with them, the top of the tower still swayed noticeably.
SODAR
With the constant beeping echoing around us, I finally understood why the tower had a SODAR (Sonic Detection And Ranging) system in the first place – to measure wind speed and direction at different altitudes.
Why?
Well, if the nuclear plant ever suffered a critical failure, officials would immediately know which direction a radioactive cloud might travel – and which areas would need to be evacuated first.
So that was it. We enjoyed being higher than the workers painting the cooling towers, and then slowly climbed back down.
And from that day on, I stopped being scared of ladders.