Polish energy company Orlen recently announced plans to build two SMRs in Poland. They are going with the GE Vernova-Hitachi BWRX-300 design.
Poland’s first small modular nuclear power plant, or SMR, will be built in Włocławek, energy company Orlen announced on Thursday, the first project of its kind in Europe.
Poland will build Europe’s first BWRX-300 small modular nuclear reactor (SMR), marking a major step in its shift away from coal and toward cleaner energy, state-run energy giant Orlen announced Thursday.
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Plans are already underway to build three Westinghouse AP1000 plants in Poland. Westinghouse and Bechtel are teaming up to supply the reactors and build the plants.
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Poland still gets most of its electricity from coal, and they are trying to move to cleaner sources of power.
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Meanwhile, in the US, a company called Fermi America is planning four AP1000s, plus SMRs, plus natural gas fueled power plants, plus renewables and batteries, to power a huge energy complex in Texas. The entire facility will reportedly have a capacity of 11 gigawatts, and will be used to supply power to computer data centers. The NRC recently accepted a partial license application for the AP1000 portion of the project.
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Just to review, several Westinghouse AP1000s have already been built, including two new plants in the US in Georgia. (Vogtle-4 recently entered its first refueling outage after a successful first fuel cycle run.)
Regarding the Polish SMR plans, the first GEH BWRX-300 is currently being built in Canada, at the existing Darlington plant. There are also plans for BWRX-300s in the US in Tennessee, and perhaps elsewhere.
_ Pete