Environmental regulator gives nod to plans for first Polish nuclear plant
Poland’s General Directorate for Environmental Protection (GDOŚ) has given its imprimatur to the Central European nation’s plan to build and operate its first nuclear power facility, state-owned utility Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe announced last Friday.
PEJ, which submitted its environmental impact report for the proposed project to GDOŚ in March 2022, called the decision “a key permit obtained in the investment process, because subsequent administrative approvals, including the decision to determine the location of the investment and the building permit, must comply with the arrangements and conditions contained in the decision on environmental conditions.”
News of the decision followed by a day Westinghouse and Bechtel’s announcement that the companies had signed a consortium agreement to partner on the design and construction of the plant—to be located at Lubiatowo-Kopalino, a site in northern Poland near the Baltic coast about 40 miles northwest of Gdansk, the capital of Poland’s Pomeranian province.
According to PEJ, an earlier draft version of the GDOŚ decision had been reviewed by the director of the Maritime Office in Gdynia, the Pomeranian state sanitary inspector, the director of the regional water management authority in Gdansk, the president of Poland’s National Atomic Energy Agency, and the country’s minister of climate and environment.
Plus, national and cross-border consultations with 14 countries were conducted prior to the final decision being reached, PEJ said.
Łukaszewska-Trzeciakowska
Official words: “The plans of the Polish government concerning the reconstruction of the energy mix are among the most ambitious in Europe,” said Anna Łukaszewska-Trzeciakowska, government plenipotentiary for strategic energy infrastructure. “The scale of the challenges and the pace of change are enormous, which is why it is so important to timely implement large and complex investment projects, such as the construction of the first nuclear power plant in Poland, which will be implemented according to the planned schedule.”
Berger
Mateusz Berger, president of PEJ’s management board, noted, “The decision on environmental conditions is one of the most important stages in the permit process and brings us significantly closer to the start of the construction of the first nuclear power plant in Poland. It defines the conditions to be met in order to be able to carry out a nuclear investment in accordance with both national and international environmental regulations and requirements. On behalf of the company, I would like to thank the representatives of the [GDOŚ] for their cooperation in the environmental procedure and for issuing this decision.”
