Site control is a legal formality until you notice what it costs to get there. Bechtel took over management of the Lubiatowo-Kopalino site in northern Poland from state developer Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe on August 7, and large-scale earthwork is now moving on 740 acres north of Gdańsk.
The plant is a three-unit AP1000 station at 3,750 MWe, delivered by a Bechtel and Westinghouse consortium. Westinghouse supplies the reactor technology. Bechtel is the construction contractor. The European Commission has put total investment at roughly $52 billion.
What is actually being built right now
Polish contractor Budimex is performing the initial earthwork: grading and leveling, drainage upgrades, and about 10 miles of temporary roads. A Stage 2 preparatory work permit issued June 30 authorizes roughly 88 acres of warehouse and technical support facilities, 7.5 acres of office and worker facilities, and 13.5 acres of parking.
Eleven specialized workshop buildings are planned. The largest is a module assembly building of about 76,400 square feet standing roughly 146 feet, founded on a monolithic reinforced concrete mat. That building is the AP1000 delivery model in physical form: modules get assembled adjacent to the plant and set as units, which is how the design was supposed to compress schedule before Vogtle demonstrated what happens when module fabrication doesn’t keep up.
“This is a very important day for both Bechtel and the implementation of the entire multi-year project to build a key infrastructure and energy project for our country,” said Leszek Hołda, president of Bechtel Polska, in the company’s statement. “We are formally becoming the site’s administrators, taking over this role from Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe.”
More than 400 people are working the project now, roughly a third of them local hires.
The environmental constraints are unusually tight
Support facilities have to stay 330 feet from the Mierzeja Sarbska Natura 2000 site and 80 feet from the Biebrowski Canal. A 650-foot-wide coastal wildlife corridor stays preserved. Before nuclear facility construction can start, the project owes a full year of groundwater monitoring through at least five piezometers.
Those aren’t cosmetic conditions. A year of baseline groundwater data is a schedule item, and it sits in front of the milestone everyone is watching.
Why 2028 is the number
First nuclear concrete is targeted for 2028, with first-unit commercial operation in 2036. That’s already a three-year slip from the original plan. Whether Bechtel holds the 2028 date is the benchmark the entire Western nuclear restart gets judged against, because the AP1000 supply chain being tested here is the same one U.S. owners are counting on for domestic new-build and for the gigawatt-scale power that data center developers keep announcing.
The sequencing is also worth noting on its own. Site control and permanent earthwork are proceeding ahead of a signed EPC contract, which is the same de-risking pattern showing up on large U.S. industrial work: get the dirt moving under an early agreement, price the plant when the design is real. Boeing’s $1 billion 787 site expansion in North Charleston is running a version of the same idea, with a construction manager engaged early on a program whose completion date the owner still hasn’t published.
Financing remains the open question. Poland has authorized roughly $15.8 billion in state capitalization for PEJ under a model calling for about 70 percent external debt, figures reported by ENR rather than published in a primary document. Getting that debt priced on a first-of-a-kind program in a country with no nuclear operating history is a harder problem than the earthwork.