EU, Lithuania far from n-plant closure aid package
Date: 22-Nov-02
Country: LITHUANIA
"We know that there should be solidarity in funding these huge costs, but cannot give any figure today," Pedro de Sampaio Nunes, a top energy official at the European Commission, told reporters in Vilnius.
"I think negotiations on the subject will be more advanced when we approach 2006," he added, referring to the European Union's financial planning calendar.
He said that no new details of a proposed aid package would be announced in the near term.
In June, Lithuania agreed with an EU demand to close the second of two reactors at its Chernobyl-type Ignalina nuclear power plant in 2009. It had already agreed to close the first reactor by 2005.
Brussels had made the pledge to fully close Ignalina a condition for Lithuania completing accession talks by the end of 2002 and being included in the group of up to 10, mostly east European countries that could join the Union in 2004.
It considers the facility unsafe as it has the same design as Ukraine's disastrous Chernobyl plant.
But Lithuania has stressed that its commitment was contingent on getting adequate guarantees of EU funding for the closure during further talks this year. Vilnius estimates decommissioning costs will total some 2.4 billion euros.
"It's not that we don't want to (give more specific guarantees), but that we don't have any legal means to do that," Fernando Garces de los Fayos, Charge d'Affaires at the EC Delegation in Lithuania, told Reuters.
Lithuanian officials were not immediately available for comment.
Lithuania was the country of the world that most heavily relied on nuclear energy in 2001, when Ignalina accounted for 77.6 percent of all electricity produced in the ex-Soviet Baltic state.