Poland to seek partner for second nuclear plant in June

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WARSAW (Reuters) -Poland will begin selecting a partner for its planned second nuclear power plant in June, the country’s leading energy security official said on Wednesday.

Deputy Industry Minister Wojciech Wrochna had previously said the process would start in January.

Poland, which is working to reduce its reliance on coal, chose Westinghouse Electric to build its first nuclear plant on the Baltic Sea coast. The financing is not fully agreed, but it is meanwhile preparing to start working on a second plant.

“We want to have a capital partner, but we don’t know if we’ll find one. We have to verify what this interest is. We want to end this dialogue next year,” Wrochna told a news conference.

“We will conduct a dialogue with the market. We won’t include a model or a contractor. We want to negotiate what is possible in terms of technology, contractor, financing and operation. We will talk to everyone, the French, the Americans, the Canadians,” he added.Wrochna said that the participation of Polish companies in the construction of the first nuclear plant will be of “crucial importance” in negotiations for the engineering and construction contract with the U.S. builder, which have already begun.

Poland aims to start the construction of the first unit of the plant in 2028 and complete it in 2036, four years later than initially planned.

(Reporting by Marek Strzelecki; editing by Barbara Lewis and Bernadette Baum)