Poland should drop nuclear energy plans – Greenpeace

Poland should turn to offshore wind farms for safer, cheaper energy and more jobs instead of pushing ahead with plans to build its first nuclear power facility by 2020, a study has said.

“Either we’ll choose the dangerous atom and pay higher energy bills or we’ll invest in offshore wind farms on the Baltic, thanks to which we’ll pay less for electricity and create more jobs,” Maciej Muscat, head of Greenpeace Poland, said in a statement as the findings of a fresh study, Sea Wind vs the Atom, were made public.

It concluded that rather than pushing ahead with plans to build a three gigawatt nuclear facility, 2004 ex-communist EU member Poland should invest in 5.7 gigawatts’ worth of offshore wind farms off its Baltic Sea coast.

A move to wind energy would generate more than 9,000 jobs, compared to 7,000 in the nuclear sector, and competitively-priced electrical power at €104 per megawatt hour instead of €110 per megawatt hour for nuclear power, the study said.

Authored by Grzegorz Wisniewski, head of Poland’s Institute for Renewable Energy (IEO), and commissioned by Greenpeace Poland and Germany’s Heinrich Boell NGO, the study also alleged that the Tusk government had significantly understated the costs of nuclear energy – at about €67 per megawatt hour.