Bechtel said the agreements were signed during a ceremony at the US ambassador’s residence in Warsaw.
The 12 companies provide services ranging from earthwork and infrastructure construction to concrete, tunnelling, electrical installations and heavy cranes. They include Energoprojekt Katowice, Hitachi Energy Poland, electrical cable route manufacturer BAKS and the Protea Group.
“Construction of these power plants would require Polish expertise and thousands of skilled, Polish workers,” said Ahmet Tokpinar, general manager of Bechtel’s Nuclear Power business line. “As the EPC [engineering, procurement and construction] partner for these projects, Bechtel intends to join with a large number of Polish companies as key members of our subcontracting team. Now is the time to identify these future partners in the supply chain.”
Bechtel and Westinghouse Electric Company are jointly preparing a front-end engineering design for the government’s consideration for a three-reactor nuclear station on the Baltic Sea coast. The plant, using Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, would be Poland’s first civil nuclear power plant.
Poland wants to build from 6,000 to 9,000 MW of installed nuclear capacity based on proven, large-scale, pressurised water nuclear reactors, and is expected to choose a technology vendor by the end of 2022. Commercial operation of a first unit in a proposed set of six is planned for 2033.
In December 2021, the Lubiatowo-Kopalino site in the northern province of Pomerania near the Baltic coast was selected as the preferred location for Poland’s first commercial nuclear power station.
