It appeared to be a typical harvest festival on Poland’s picturesque Baltic coast, with women in traditional dress singing folk songs and local farmers displaying their wares.

But among the stalls selling sausages and hams was a more unusual sight: men in white lab coats talking about nuclear radiation (not a problem, they said soothingly), and protesters in T-shirts emblazoned with the message, “No Atoms on the Baltic!”

Arguments over atomic technology might seem odd for a village fair celebrating the gathering of crops. But in Choczewo — a district in northern Poland dotted with farms, forests and white-sand beaches — the debate over nuclear energy is very real.

It started 40 years ago with an ill-fated Communist-era plan to construct Russian-designed reactors at a nearby lake. That effort buried a village in concrete and became a lightning rod for anti-Russian sentiment, but, aborted in 1990 by Poland’s first post-Communist government, it never produced electricity.

Poland, which has since joined NATO, is trying again.

Plans are underway to place three American-made Westinghouse reactors on the Choczewo district’s Baltic shore, just 10 miles from the abandoned ruins of the Soviet plant.