Nuclear energy: Poland postpones date for its first nuclear power plant
Poland wants to move away from coal as an energy source with the help of nuclear power. This will probably happen later than originally planned.
Ruins of the never-completed Żarnowiec nuclear power plant. The decision to build it was made in 1971, but then the Chernobyl disaster intervened. The population voted against the project in a referendum.
(Bild: gov.pl, Public Domain)
The first Polish nuclear power plant will probably be connected to the grid later than planned. At the 16th European Economic Congress in Katowice, Marzena Czarnecka, the country's Minister of Industry, now assumes that the nuclear power plant will not be ready until 2039 or 2040. The plans that became known almost three years ago stated that the first reactor block would be built from 2026 and connected to the grid in 2033.
The first reactor is planned to have an electrical output of 3,750 MW and is to be built near Choczewo or Gniewino and Krokowa, both located in the Pomeranian Voivodeship, close to the Baltic coast and the city of Gdynia. As a neighboring country, Poland informed Germany about the plans in February 2022. Poland plans to build a total of six units with a capacity of up to 9 GW at two locations by 2043. Lubiatowo, which is also located in Pomerania, is also a possible location.
According to Polish media, Czarnecka said that it would be impossible to keep to the 2033 planning deadline. It is well known that all investments in such plants are delayed. The previous government, which had drawn up the plans, had assumed an optimistic scenario and did not yet have any information available.
80 percent from coal
Nuclear power should help Poland to phase out coal – the country currently generates almost 80 percent of its energy from hard coal and lignite. The German government demanded to be involved in the planning for Polish nuclear power plants because potentially significant negative cross-border environmental impacts on Germany could not be ruled out. An expert report commissioned by the Green parliamentary group in the Bundestag found that Germany could be affected by an accident at a Polish nuclear power plant, with a probability of 20 percent.
In the fall of 2023, Poland informed the German Ministry of the Environment about new construction projects for Small Modular Reactors (SMR). This involves an SMR with a total output of up to 1300 MWe at the Stawy Monowskie site in the municipality of Oświęcim, an SMR with a total output of up to 2000 MWe at the Włocławek site and an SMR with a total output of up to 1300 MWe in Ostrołęka. All three sites are planned to use BWRX-300 technology from Hitachi Nuclear Energy.
(anw)
