Lithuanian nuclear closure depends on EU funds - PM
Date: 16-Aug-01
Country: LITHUANIA
Author: Andrius Vilkancas
Lithuania, hoping to complete EU membership talks next year, has already agreed to shut down the first of the Ignalina plant's two reactors by 2005, under pressure from the 15-nation bloc.
It has not set a closure date for the second one, but the EU has said it would like to see it shut down in 2009.
"The shorter the period set for Ignalina's closure, the larger the annual investment that has to be set," Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas told Reuters after talks with German Finance Minister Hans Eichel about Lithuania's EU preparations.
"(We ask) that Germany support our stand that special funds should be set aside for the closure of the plant and that (these funds) not be included in overall funding allocated to Lithuania," Brazauskas said.
The EU considers Ignalina a danger because it was built to the same design as Ukraine's Chernobyl, site of the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster in 1986.
It has said Vilnius must decide next year - two years earlier than Lithuanian originally planned - on a date to throw the final switch on reactor number two.
The Baltic state's top EU negotiator said two weeks ago Lithuania would adhere to the Brussels's timetable for making a decision, but this did not mean it accepted the 2009 date.
Brazauskas declined to give a date for Unit Two closure but reiterated that the country would fix on one before winding up EU entry talks, expected next year.
For Lithuania, closure of the plant is sensitive because of the costs associated with it and because the country gets most of its electricity from Ignalina.
Last year, Lithuania received pledges from the international community totalling 208 million euros ($186.4 million) to close Ignalina's first reactor.
"On the one hand (Ignalina) is an issue of safety and on the other it is a big economic problem...but, I think, we - Lithuania and the European Union - will find a way to settle that issue," Eichel told a news briefing in Vilnius.