Villages spared a Soviet nuclear plant are split over a US one

Choczewo, Poland: It appeared to be a typical harvest festival on Poland’s picturesque Baltic coast, with women in traditional dress singing folk songs and local farmers displaying their wares.

But among the stalls selling sausages and hams was a more unusual sight: men in white lab coats talking about nuclear radiation (not a problem, they said soothingly), and protesters in T-shirts emblazoned with the message, “No Atoms on the Baltic!”

Arguments over atomic technology might seem odd for a village fair celebrating the gathering of crops. But in Choczewo — a district in northern Poland dotted with farms, forests and white-sand beaches — the debate over nuclear energy is very real.

It started 40 years ago with an ill-fated communist-era plan to construct Russian-designed reactors at a nearby lake. That effort buried a village in concrete and became a lightning rod for anti-Russian sentiment, but, aborted in 1990 by Poland’s first post-communist government, it never produced electricity.

Poland, which has since joined NATO, is trying again.

Plans are under way to place three American-made Westinghouse reactors on the Choczewo district’s Baltic shore, just 10 miles from the abandoned ruins of the Soviet plant.

Expected to cost more than $35 billion, it would be Poland’s first operating nuclear plant, a project of huge economic and strategic significance. The venture is an emblem not only of Poland’s close relations with the United States but also of wider geopolitical calculations in a region badly shaken by the war in Ukraine.

“We’ve been really pulling out the stops for this project,” said Andrew Light, the Biden administration’s assistant secretary of energy for international affairs. The reactors, he said, would advance a US goal of helping countries across Eastern and Central Europe to “disentangle themselves from Russian energy.”

Referring to the plant at a meeting in 2022, President Joe Biden advised his Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda, to “get it done,” according to the US ambassador to Poland, Mark Brzezinski, who attended.

“Energy security is the holy grail in overall security,” Brzezinski said, hailing the nuclear plant as “the most significant expression of our relationship with Poland since it joined NATO in 1999.”

There has been overwhelming support in Poland for a nuclear plant touted by Warsaw and Washington as a guarantee of long-term energy security and as a cure for a heavy dependence on carbon-emitting coal.

Poland has weaned itself off Russian gas and petroleum since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but it still generates nearly three-quarters of its electricity from fossil fuels.

Even many Polish environmentalists, after years of protesting, have dropped opposition to what the International Energy Agency says could be “a new dawn for nuclear energy.”

But the project has already upset the placid rhythms of country life in Choczewo. Locals are divided on the plan, with some cheering the prospect of cleaner, cheaper energy and others aghast at having reactors on their doorstep.

“This is one of the most beautiful places in Poland,” said Daniel Nowak, a Catholic priest in Wejherowo, near Choczewo, who helped rally opposition to the communist-era plant in the 1980s because “it would all have been controlled by the Russians.”

He said he had no problem with Westinghouse reactors, noting that “America is an ally, not an enemy,” but, like many residents, he says, “They should go somewhere different.”

The odds of that happening are slim. Moving ahead on the plan is one of the few things that Poland’s divided political camps agree on. “It will definitely happen, definitely,” said Maciej Bando, an official in Warsaw overseeing the project for the center-left administration. The plans were also embraced by the previous, right-wing government.

“After the shock of Chernobyl, we can see that the whole world is now considering a return to nuclear power,” Bando added.

He said that it was “entirely normal that not everyone is in favor,” but predicted that the plant would “bring gigantic benefits to the local community,” like increased tax revenue. The location, he added, “is not subject to change.”

Work recently started on felling pines to make way for survey teams studying whether the land could bear the weight of the Westinghouse reactors. The plant, which would be built by Bechtel and would not start producing electricity for more than a decade, is to cover an area equal to about 70 football fields and would bring in around 20,000 construction workers and engineers to Choczewo, which currently has fewer than 6,000 residents.

Jaroslaw Bach, Choczewo’s elected district head and a native of the coastal village of Slajszewo, where the reactors would be built, said he was personally conflicted.

He said he understood that Poland needed nuclear energy to power development and break its coal dependence. But, he added, “As a resident of Slajszewo, I’m against it.” The nuclear reactors, he said, “could be put somewhere else.”

The project also envisages constructing a railway line, roads and a pier to be used for shipping in equipment and building materials. The pier would jut 1,000 yards into the Baltic from Slajszewo’s forest-fringed beach, a place of spectacular natural beauty.

A dirt track through the forest to the sea at Slajszewo is now bordered by an expanse of treeless, sandy land sealed off by fences that carry messages lauding nuclear power.

“When we first heard what they were doing, we were so angry,” said Alina Treder, who was walking back from the beach with her husband recently. But, she acknowledged, “It could be good for our children if we can stop poisoning the air with coal.”

SOS Baltic, a group of local residents, many of them owners of holiday rental cottages, has been pushing back against the argument that, whatever damage it causes, the planned nuclear plant will serve a greater good.

“It is ridiculous to destroy nature in the name of saving the planet,” said Zuzanna Kaczor, an SOS Baltic member.

Her group set up a stall at the Choczewo harvest festival, warning visitors about the imminent destruction of their forests and beaches. At a rival stall, pronuclear activists erected a banner reading, “Yes to Atoms in Choczewo,” and handed out leaflets extolling benefits including lower electricity prices and business opportunities.

Polish Nuclear Power Plants, a state-owned company managing the project, also had two large tents staffed by scientists equipped with devices monitoring ambient radiation — and with arguments about why nobody has anything to fear.

Andrzej Jedrzejczak, 78, a nuclear engineer who worked on the abandoned Soviet plant, said that project, at nearby Zarnowiec, should never have been aborted in the first place.

That, he said, “was a stupid, stupid decision.” The Zarnowiec plant was already mostly built when Warsaw, running out of money, arguing with Moscow and harboring concerns about Russian technology after the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, pulled the plug after Poland’s democratic elections in 1989.

Surrounded by a rusty metal fence, the remains of the plant — a hulking maze of concrete buildings and tunnels — have been left to crumble. “It’s like a post-apocalypse movie set,” said Piotr Wroblewski, a local journalist who wrote a book about the plant.

The abandonment of Poland’s first foray into nuclear energy left a sour taste among the former residents of the lakeside village that was destroyed for the project in 1984.

Henryk Styn, who was 18 when his farming family was ordered to leave, said his father never recovered from “leaving his whole life behind” and seeing his village bulldozed.

As a reminder of his vanished home, Styn’s father put up a wooden cross rescued from the demolished village in front of his new home in Odargowo.

A supporter of the new nuclear project, Styn said he hoped that the Westinghouse reactors, unlike their Soviet predecessors, would actually get built and start working.

“There has already been too much damage for nothing,” he said.