A Plant That Won't Switch on Until 2036, and Why the Leadership Hiring Clock Is Already Running

Bechtel has formally taken over site management at Poland's Lubiatowo-Kopalino nuclear power plant, marking the moment the country's first nuclear project shifts from planning and permitting into large-scale site preparation and earthworks. It's a genuinely significant milestone, and it's also a useful case study in a leadership planning problem the infrastructure sector doesn't talk about enough.

The scale of what's actually underway

The Lubiatowo-Kopalino site, a 300-hectare development in the Choczewo municipality of Pomerania, will host three Westinghouse AP1000 reactors with a combined output of 3,750MWe, Poland's first nuclear power programme. Bechtel, working in consortium with Westinghouse for the utility Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe (PEJ), now supervises contractor coordination, day-to-day construction activity, and site safety. Budimex, one of Poland's largest construction firms, has been selected to lead earthworks, which include ground levelling, drainage system upgrades, and a temporary road network spanning roughly 16 kilometres.

More than 200 people are already working on-site, a number PEJ expects to grow steadily in the coming months. The project carries an estimated investment cost of around $52 billion according to the European Commission, with Poland having authorised roughly $15.8 billion in state capitalisation and a financing model built around 70% external debt. First nuclear concrete is targeted for 2028, with phased commissioning of the three units expected across 2036–2038.

We asked our network when leadership hiring should start. The answer was decisive.

We put the question to LinkedIn: for a project commissioning in 2036, when should permanent leadership hiring realistically start? 86 votes came in, and the result was clear. 52% said five years before launch, the single largest answer by a wide margin. A further 19% went further still, saying leadership hiring should start now, a full decade out. Combined, more than seven in ten respondents believe leadership hiring should begin well before construction visibly ramps up. Only 23% would wait until construction begins, and just 6% would wait until the project is nearly complete.

That's a meaningful data point, because it runs directly counter to how most organisations actually behave. The instinct, understandably, is to treat leadership hiring as something that scales with visible progress: more site activity, more urgency, more hiring. Our poll suggests the market already knows that instinct is backwards.

Why this project is a useful test case

A decade-long horizon exposes a leadership planning problem that rarely gets discussed openly. Projects of this scale don't typically fail on engineering. Westinghouse's AP1000 design is proven technology, most recently deployed at Plant Vogtle in the US, and Bechtel brings direct experience delivering it. The technical risk on a project like this is real but manageable.

What's harder to manage is leadership continuity: having the people in place who understand both the technical scope and the decade-long stakeholder, regulatory, and community relationships required to carry a first-of-a-kind nuclear build through to commissioning. Bechtel's own commitments on this project illustrate the point. The company has named a dedicated Project Director, established a Gdańsk branch that's expected to grow into its main operational and engineering base as the project progresses, and partnered with Gdańsk University of Technology and Warsaw University of Technology to launch Nuclear Energy Career Development Programmes, an explicit acknowledgment that the workforce and leadership bench for a project like this has to be built years ahead of peak construction, not assembled once it arrives.

What reactive hiring actually costs

Organisations that wait until construction visibly ramps up to build this bench are, by definition, hiring reactively for a role that needed years of runway. The leaders capable of steering a project like this, spanning site preparation now through commissioning in the 2030s, are a small pool. They are not sitting on the market waiting for a fully scoped role to appear, and the process of identifying, engaging, and successfully placing that kind of leadership talent takes far longer than a standard executive search timeline assumes.

Our poll result suggests the market broadly understands this in principle. The harder question is whether hiring practices actually reflect it, and for most organisations managing long-horizon infrastructure projects, the honest answer is probably not yet.

What this means going forward

This is precisely the kind of long-horizon leadership planning Spencer Ogden's Critical Infrastructure practice is built for: identifying and securing the permanent leadership capability a decade-long project needs, well before ground is broken on the next phase. As more first-of-a-kind nuclear, grid, and large-scale infrastructure projects move from planning into delivery across Europe, the organisations that treat leadership hiring as a decade-long discipline, not a construction-phase reaction, will be the ones that actually hit their commissioning dates.

Spencer Ogden partners with utilities, developers, and EPC contractors to build the leadership capability that long-horizon critical infrastructure projects depend on. Get in touch to discuss your workforce strategy for first-of-a-kind builds.