VIENNA, June 26 (Kyodo) — After a 30-year wait, the world's only nuclear power plant kept dormant by the population finally started to produce energy on Thursday.

The grey giant in Zwentendorf in Austria houses 1,000 solar panels in its concrete walls and the area around it, with 300 starting operations.

From July 24, all of the solar elements will produce 180,000 kW/h of electricity per year, according to a press release from the governor of Lower Austria, Erwin Proell.

Burkhard Hofer, director general of the EVN, an electricity supply company in Lower Austria, described the facility "as a symbol for renewable energy and an environment-friendly future."

According to Proell, 25 percent of Lower Austria's energy originates from renewable energy sources, such as wind, water, biomass and the sun.

The huge gray concrete building in the village of Zwentendorf, about 50 kilometers west of Vienna, would have been a fully functional nuclear power plant. But it turned out to be a 500 million euro failure when 50.5 percent of Austrians voted against the plant's operations after seven years of construction work on Nov. 5, 1978.

At the outskirts of the village, only a few meters away from the Danube River, the gray colossus is a visible sign of Austria's rejection of nuclear energy and its fear of this technology.

The decision against nuclear power led to the adoption of a law which prohibits the production of energy out of nuclear fusion in the country, and with that marks the end of this technology even before it actually takes hold in Austria.

Now the thick concrete walls only seem to be hiding the remains of a plant that could have produced a capacity of 700 MW of electricity.

By earning money through selling parts of the facility and providing training space for staff of similar boiling-water reactors in Germany, the building earns enough money to have its 1,050 rooms serviced.

Eight to 10 hours each day, Johann Fleischer, chief technician, takes care of the building.

There is enough to do each day, he says. Maintenance, repairs and training foreign participants keeps him busy.

There should have been 200 people working at the plant, but Fleischer is the only permanent employee since 2002.

Nevertheless, inside the building everything looks like those 200 people could come back and start work any minute, if only time had not left its visible traces.