Poland's largest power group Polska Grupa Energetyczna said Sunday it had started two tender procedures for its nascent nuclear power program.
PGE said an owner's engineer tender for technological advisory services and another for environmental and site surveying had been launched by its newly created subsidiary PGE EJ 1.
A governmental dispute over the costs of Poland's nuclear power program could delay the country's first nuclear plant, according to a report Monday.
The daily Rzeczpospolita said Poland's finance minister, Jacek Rostowski, has criticized the high cost of the economy ministry's estimated Zloty 840 million ($289 million) nuclear program.
Russia is proposing to build a high-voltage electricity cable from Kaliningrad to Germany across the Baltic Sea to export power produced from a newly to be built nuclear power plant. The cable would be laid alongside the last part of the gas pipeline Nordstream that Gazprom is building together with western partners and that will be used to transport gas direct from Russia to Germany across the Baltic Sea. The electricity cable would similarly bypass third countries, in this case Poland. A representative from the German Ministry of Economic Affairs says he does not expect Germany to be willing to acquiesce to the plan. ‘I cannot imagine that the German public will want to import nuclear power (“Atomstrom”) from Russia’, he says.
Fresh from her controversial announcement that Germany aims to postpone abandoning nuclear energy, Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday threw Berlin's weight behind a planned four-nation plant in Lithuania.
"We'll do everything we can to ensure that this construction gets backing," Merkel told reporters during a visit to the Baltic state, saying German authorities could help bring potential investors on board.
Poland will commission its first nuclear power plant in 2022, two years after the original schedule, Hanna Trojanowska, the government's nuclear energy adviser, said Thursday.
"In effect, in the verified schedule 2022 appears as the date for the start-up of the first unit," Trojanowska told the state news agency PAP.
WARSAW (IDN) - Backed by the U.S. and France, Poland is set to tread the nuclear path and hopes to start generating atomic power by 2021. Presently, coal accounts for over 93 percent of the eastern European country's electricity, demand for which is expected to double by 2025.
A four-stage plan announced by Hanna Trojanowska, the government's Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Energy, envisages appropriate legislation by the end of 2010; site, technology and construction arrangements between 2011 and 2013; technical plans and site works in 2014 and 2015; and construction from 2016 to 2020.
Collective nuclear waste dumps, called European Regional Repositories, are to crop up in Eastern Europe, also in Poland, in the near future.
This is a joint EU initiative, currently developed in the European Repository Development Organization, of which Poland is a member. Negotiations on the construction of the collective geological repositories and the transport routes for nuclear waste are to begin in May. The talks are expected to last two years.
High-level nuclear waste from across the European Union could be shipped to eastern Europe for burial in a central underground storage facility under plans being considered by EU member states.
The Times has learnt that the project, which comes amid a resurgence of interest in nuclear power, could be given the green light later this year by the European Commission. Ewoud Verhoef, deputy director of Covra, the agency responsible for the storage of the Netherlands´ nuclear waste, said: "The nuclear programme in Holland is small and the cost of building a geological repository is very high. We only have one nuclear reactor in the Netherlands so there would be big advantages to a shared solution."
Polish Minister of the Economy, Waldemar Pawlak, has described nuclear energy as one among other options of the development of Polish power industry. Addressing journalists at an informal meeting in Warsaw of the Ministers of Economy with power-consuming corporations on reducing carbon dioxide emission, Pawlak cautioned not to ‘become obsessed with nuclear energy and treat it as only one of many options’.
KISIELICE, Poland (AFP) — Standing in the shadow of a massive windmill, Mayor Tomasz Koprowiak thinks part of the answer to Poland kicking its coal habit is blowing in the wind and growing in farmers' fields.
"Our new straw-fired heating plant serves 80 percent of the community and is saving everyone money," Koprowiak says of Kisielice, a poor north-eastern rural municipality of 6,500.
