Poland and Westinghouse-Bechtel agree main terms of the AP1000 EPC contract
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readPolskie Elektrownie Jądrowe (PEJ), the state-owned company building Poland's first nuclear power plant, has settled the principal commercial and legal conditions of its EPC contract - engineering, procurement and construction - with the Westinghouse-Bechtel consortium, World Nuclear News reported on 24 September. The agreed terms are a framework: the parties still have to negotiate specific elements and the contract's exhibits - the technical specifications and supporting documents - and they intend to finish by the end of this year.
The plant will use Westinghouse's AP1000 reactor at Lubiatowo-Kopalino in the Choczewo municipality of Pomerania, on Poland's Baltic coast. The technology was chosen in November 2022, and an 18-month engineering services contract to develop a site-specific design followed in September 2023. Work on the ground has already moved beyond planning: Bechtel took over management of the site in August as earthworks began, the second phase of preparatory work and detailed geological surveys is under way, and PEJ filed its construction licence application with the National Atomic Energy Agency in March. PEJ's president, Marek Woszczyk, repeated that the first electricity from the plant should reach the Polish grid in 2036.
What it means
An EPC contract is where a nuclear project's risk is allocated, and "main terms agreed" is the stage at which the hardest questions - price structure, who carries cost overruns, schedule guarantees - are supposed to be settled in principle. None of those terms has been published, so the announcement tells us the negotiation has not stalled, not how the risk has been divided. That division is what matters most: the last AP1000s built in the US, at Vogtle, finished years late and far over budget, and the contractual allocation of that overrun shaped who survived it.
The timeline is the other thing to watch. With site works started, a licence application pending and a contract due by December, 2036 implies roughly a decade from contract to first power - ambitious for a first-of-a-kind national programme, though consistent with the vendors' claim that a standardised design and an experienced construction contractor shorten the path. The next concrete milestones are the signed EPC contract itself and the regulator's decision on the construction licence; until both exist, 2036 remains a target rather than a schedule.