Poland announces continued agreement with US consortium on developing first nuclear plant

Apr 2, 2025 | Business, Energy & Climate, Politics

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

The Polish government has announced that it has completed negotiations on a new agreement with a US consortium – made up of the Westinghouse and Bechtel corporations – to continue developing Poland’s first nuclear power plant.

It says that, despite the previous contract having expired at the end of March and the new one not yet being signed, work on the project will go on as scheduled.

In October 2022, the former Law and Justice (PiS) government picked American firm Westinghouse as its partner in constructing the power plant, which will be located in Choczewo on Poland’s northern Baltic Sea coast.

The following year, Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe (PEJ), the state-owned entity responsible for building the plant, signed an agreement with a consortium of Westinghouse and Bechtel to design the facility.

At the end of last month, the contract expired without a new agreement being concluded. However, the government – a new coalition that replaced PiS in December 2023 – insisted that the project would be unaffected.

 

On Tuesday, the day after the previous contract had expired, Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced that “negotiations on a bridge agreement with the contractors have been completed”, reports broadcaster RMF.

He added that the deal would now be “much more beneficial for us”, including elements that would provide for stronger oversight of spending and specific deadlines that would result in penalties if they were not met.

Subsequently, the industry ministry issued a statement confirming that “the terms of an engineering development agreement (EDA) have been agreed upon, establishing the framework for cooperation in the coming months between PEJ and the Westinghouse-Bechtel consortium”.

“The EDA opens the next stage of construction…and includes the continuation of specific design work related to, among others, obtaining the necessary administrative decisions, licenses and permits, as well as a further stage of in-depth geological research on the investment site,” said the ministry.

It also emphasised that the “agreement reached and the compromise worked out constitute a solid and sustainable foundation for the continuation of Polish-American cooperation within the project”. But it noted that “corporate approval” was still needed before the EDA can be signed.

Nevertheless, the project will continue to move forward “according to the adopted schedule”, assured the ministry. Westinghouse and Bechtel have not yet commented on the developments.

Last week, President Andrzej Duda – an ally of the former ruling PiS party – signed into law a government bill that will provide 60 billion zloty (€14.4 billion) in financing for construction of the nuclear plant.

That will cover around 30% of the project’s total estimated costs, with the remainder coming from foreign borrowing. However, Poland is still awaiting European Union approval for the state aid it wants to provide to the project.

According to current plans, construction is scheduled to start in 2028, with the first of three reactors going online in 2036. By the start of 2039, the plant is expected to be fully operational.

Under the government’s Polish Nuclear Power Program, as well as the plant on the Baltic coast, there will also be a second nuclear power station at an as-yet-undecided location elsewhere in Poland. The total combined capacity of the two plants will be between 6 and 9 GW.


Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

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