Lithuania shuts Soviet-built reactor
VILNIUS, Lithuania - Engineers at Lithuania’s Soviet-built nuclear power plant began shutting down a Soviet-built nuclear reactor yesterday as part of an agreement with the European Union, which considers the Chernobyl-type machine unsafe.
The shutdown has been greeted with anguish across Lithuania, as the recession-hit country will lose a source of cheap electricity and be forced to import more expensive energy.
Its last working reactor - ordered closed by the EU because it is considered too similar to the one that exploded at Chernobyl in 1986 - boasts a capacity of 1,320 megawatts, making it one of the largest nuclear reactors in the world.
Lithuania - one of the two most nuclear energy-dependent nations along with France - had been hoping that the EU would allow it to keep the plant open for two to three more years, but Brussels, which demanded the reactor’s shutdown as part of Lithuania’s membership agreement, flatly refused.
“We are keeping our word to our European partners,’’ Energy Minister Arvydas Sekmokas said during a visit to the plant on New Year’s Eve.
In April 1986, an earlier, smaller version of the RBMK reactor at Ignalina exploded in Chernobyl, Ukraine, casting a fallout cloud over a wide swathe of Europe.
The nation will cover the shortfall by buying power on the open market from Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia.
