The European Commission (EC) has granted environment approval for Horizon Nuclear Power's £16bn (about €18bn) Wylfa Newydd nuclear power plant project in Anglesey (North Wales, United Kingdom) as per the article 37 of the Euratom treaty, considering that the project will not have significant health or environmental impacts on other Member States. Besides, the EC estimates that all the planned steps of the projects comply with European safety standards under all scenarios.
The Wylfa Newydd project would comprise up to four Advanced Boiling Water Reactors (ABWRs) with a combined capacity of around 5,400 MW. The EPC contract will be for the first part (two reactors with a total capacity of 2,760 MW) of the project. Horizon Nuclear Power is a fully-owned subsidiary of Japanese group Hitachi and it selected Menter Newydd, a joint venture (JV) of Hitachi Nuclear Energy Europe, Bechtel and JGC Corporation, to build the project on the site of the former 980 MW Wylfa nuclear power plant in May 2016. Construction is expected to start in 2020 and the first unit should be operating in the first half of the 2020s.