Germany concerned about Poland’s nuclear energy plans

Germany concerned about Poland’s nuclear energy plans, DW, 17 Feb 21, The Polish government wants to start producing nuclear energy in 2033 and has agreed to deals with the US and France. But Germany is increasingly alarmed by its neighbor’s energy plans……….

A seemingly perfect solution

Nuclear reactors are considered by many to be the perfect solution. Plans to develop nuclear energy go back to the 1970s and construction had begun on two reactors of Soviet design in Zarnowiec, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of Gdansk, but was stopped after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. All subsequent attempts to relaunch the project failed. Now, the new reactors will probably be built in Zarnowiec and nearby Lubiatowo-Kopalino.

However, Poland cannot fund the reactors, whose capacity will be six to nine gigawatts and which are estimated to cost €30 billion ($36 billion). Last year, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said that the ideal partners for the project, both in terms of technology transfer and funds, would be “proven partners from NATO and the western world.”

US or France?

An ideal partner for Poland would be the US. Former President Donald Trump raised great hopes when he visited his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda in June 2020 and promised support from US companies. The prime minister said that the meeting had “moved Poland in the right direction.”

The two countries signed a preliminary agreement to cooperate on the development of Poland’s nuclear energy program less than a month before Trump’s election defeat.

But with Trump out of office, Poland lost its closest ally. Now France has come into play. On February 2, the day the government approved the energy strategy, French Foreign Trade Minister Franck Riester visited Poland to offer support.

The CEO of the state-owned Electricite de France (EDF) spoke to the Polish media and proposed a deal to fund two-thirds of the project while promoting the European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), which is already in operation in Taishan, China. With a capacity of over 1000 MW (1 GW) the gigantic reactor corresponds to what the government is looking for.

Potential risks…..

Other experts said that Poland’s plans went against the current trend in the EU to move towards gas and renewable energies.

“With current technologies, it would not be difficult to raise the share of renewables in the energy mix to 80%. The missing 20% is due to the Polish winter, when there is little wind and little sun,” Marcin Popkiewicz, a nuclear physicist at Warsaw University, told DW, pointing out that it’s also very expensive to build nuclear power plants. “For customers, the cost of nuclear energy could be five times the cost of renewables.”

Lagging behind

The government’s energy strategy already includes renewables, but progress has been slow. Their share of the energy mix has stagnated at 14% for years. This is lower than the EU average of 20% (2020). This could change in 2025 when Poland’s first wind farm on the Baltic coast goes into operation. It’s slated to reach a capacity of 8 GW by 2040………..

For the time being, fossil fuels account for the bulk of Poland’s energy supply

Germany wants to be kept in the loop

Poland’s plans are already causing resentment in neighboring Germany. According to an expert report commissioned by the Green Party’s parliamentary faction in the German Bundestag in January, the Polish nuclear power plants, just a few hundred kilometers from the German border, would pose a high risk to the population.

“Experts evaluated everything on the basis of weather data over the past three years. There is a 20% probability that Germany would be affected by an accident at the planned nuclear power plant,” the chairwoman of the Bundestag Committee on the Environment, Ursula Kotting-Uhl, told DW. “In the worst-case scenario, 1.8 million Germans would be exposed to radiation of over 20 millisieverts. At that level, we would have to start evacuating. Berlin and Hamburg could be affected, which are densely populated.” https://www.dw.com/en/germany-concerned-about-polands-nuclear-energy-plans/a-56603782