Lithuania’s Chornobyl, the Ignalina NPP, was a key item on its negotiations table over the EU accession. It had to be closed down and the EU was to pay for it – but some in the country were still worried they were getting a raw deal.
From an icon of progress to a burden
The demolition of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) is scheduled to be completely finished only in 2038, although it has not been generating electricity for a long time. Unit 1 was shut down 20 years ago, and Unit 2 stopped in 2009.
Even before then, the plant had not been always operating smoothly: in 1994, different units were shut down one by one, one due to a water leak, another over a mysterious spike in radioactivity. A year later, part of the plant was shut cordoned off due to rusting, collapsing structures.
Media reports about problems at the Ignalina NPP in the 1990s contrasted sharply with the Soviet-era glorifications a decade before.
The 1984 film Time Does Not Split Into Atoms noted that the plant under construction in eastern Lithuania would be the most powerful in the world. With Gioachino Rossini’s score in the background, the cameraman shows a construction crew and the driver Henrikas. A voiceover proclaims that the “atom” will now ensure peace.
The film also attempts to assuage any worries of accidents and radiation. “A person gets some radioactivity from drinking mineral water,” says an expert.
The plant was planned as an all-Soviet project and was bound to be a burden once Lithuania inherited it after the union’s collapse. Lithuania was producing three times more electricity than it needed and, moreover, supplying plutonium to the Soviet military industry. This was one of the arguments that EU institutions used when negotiating with Vilnius on the plant’s decommissioning. In 1994, Lithuania entered into an agreement with the G7 to close down the plant.
Back in 1998, when Vilnius was negotiating for EU membership, the closure of the Ignalina NPP was believed to be a key issue against which Lithuania’s credibility would be assessed. Lithuania was urged to prepare an energy restructuring plan as soon as possible.
“The EU is monitoring Lithuania’s compliance with its commitments to close the Ignalina NPP,” said Ritt Bjerregaard, a member of the European Commission, in 1998. EU countries at the time had around 50 operating nuclear reactors, producing just under half of the EU’s electricity.
Negotiations and protests
The biggest point of concern about the Ignalina NPP was that it was fitted with Russian RBMK reactors, the same type as the one at Chornobyl, and that it was impossible to put a containment vessel on the plant in case of an accident. The latter was a requirement for nuclear power plants after the Chornobyl accident. Foreign officials have also referred to the low level of safety culture among staff in Lithuania.
Lithuania was already receiving direct support from the West for decommissioning preparations and putting in place safety measures, even though these were minimal.
The Lithuanian government accepted that the plant would have to be shut down, but disagreed on the timing. The closing dates kept being pushed back.
In 1998, Andrius Kubilius, then vice-speaker of the parliament, asked for a new expert assessment, arguing that perhaps the EC was afraid the report would conclude the plant could still be run for a few more years.
“The Commission is avoiding involving real nuclear safety experts in this debate. This position complicates our further decisions. We ask only one thing: that the agreement be reconfirmed by Western experts [...]. We want to play with an open hand,” he argued.
At the same time, MP Julius Veselka and a group of politicians from the People’s Union ‘For a Just Lithuania’ suggested that Western Europeans should instead close down their own nuclear power plants. Posters at a protest rally in 2000 proclaimed: we don’t want to pay more than 1 litas (at the time, USD 0.25) per kilowatt-hour of electricity.
Veselka’s poster was also accusing the EU of trying to destroy Lithuania’s agriculture and industry.
“We don’t need credits for closing down [the plant]. Let them give us credits to build electricity bridges to the West and we will make money by selling our surplus power,” the politician insisted.
According to Dainius Genys, a sociologist at Vytautas Magnus University (VDU) in Kaunas, the Ignalina NPP served as a weathervane pointing towards the social change the country was experiencing at the time. In the Soviet times and even in the first years of independence the plant offered some advantages to Lithuania, helping it withstand the energy blockade. Even then, however, green movements criticised the facility. Still, its shutdown, according to the sociologist, caused a “huge rage” among some people fearing economic consequences.
“The shutdown of the Ignalina plant pushed the country into an energy crisis – with no alternatives for energy production and dependent on Russian infrastructure, Lithuania was for a long time paying probably the highest price for imported gas. Lithuania’s geopolitical shift towards the West opened up the gaps of Soviet modernisation, which resulted not only in dependence on Soviet infrastructure and supply, but also non-compliance with Western security standards,” says Genys.
“Thus, in a very short period of time, the Ignalina NPP went from being a symbol of security and pride to a very expensive focus of public anxiety, the consequences of which are still being felt, at least in economic terms, even after the closure of the facility,” he adds.
Energy security has since then been high on the agenda of all political parties.
“It is a political paradox that, despite such a huge amount of attention both from the public and from politicians, the transformation of our energy system took more than two decades,” says Genys.
This had as much to do with domestic politics as with objective circumstances, he explains: each successive government would scrap whatever plans their predecessors had conceived in order to implement their own ideas – and fail due to opposition from them.
Could Lithuania have kept the plant?
According to contemporaries interviewed by LRT.lt, the shutdown of the plant was unavoidable.
“The closure of the Ignalina NPP was included in Lithuania’s EU Accession Treaty, so the government and the president’s office did not negotiate, it was a commitment that Lithuania had made,” says former energy minister Arvydas Sekmokas. Although the then Prime Minister Aleksandras Abišala was tasked with going around European capitals and trying to reopen the issue, he was unsuccessful in the end.
According to Sekmokas, Germany even promised to provide electricity to Lithuania, although it was not clear how this would be implemented.
Another complication, he notes, would have been all the decommissioning funding Lithuania had received by that point: had it decided not to close the plant, Vilnius would have had to repay the funds, something it could scarcely afford.
MEP Petras Auštrevičius, who took part in the shutdown negotiations, says he considers the deal Lithuania negotiated a success. Bulgaria, for example, was also closing a similar plant and received less money from the EU.
Lithuanian negotiators put together a negotiating package with an estimate of 3 billion euros, including social protection for workers.
“Lithuania agreed to close the plant earlier, but demanded more money, especially for social issues,” Auštrevičius says.
“Lithuania had not built up any decommissioning funds. We only had money to repaint the doors,” he notes.
The process received attention in foreign media too. In countries like Austria and Denmark, Auštrevičius recalls, what stirred passions was less the money given to would-be EU members than nuclear safety concerns.
“[The media] kept saying it was Chornobyl [...]. People remembered very well the panic, the tension. The Chornobyl accident did not help Lithuania, and it created anxiety, pressure. We were unlucky that our reactor was [...] of the same type as in Chornobyl,” says the MEP.
Little resistance from Russia
Sekmokas, the former energy minister, recalls the night in 2009 when “we went from being an electricity-exporting country to a deficit country overnight”. The price of electricity immediately went up by 30 percent, which caused dissatisfaction among the population.
But, he believes, there was no alternative. With hindsight, he says the process went remarkably smoothly.
Amid the concerns Lithuanian leaders had at the time was that Russia could somehow interfere.
“We were afraid of some Kremlin influences, and certain steps were taken, and the management was strengthened to ensure that the plant would be shut down and that there be no incidents,” Sekmokas recalls.
In the end, “we did not see any direct actions or measures of influence from Russia” he adds. “Apparently, Russia’s calculation was simple: Lithuania was losing a large source of electricity.”
According to Auštrevičius, Lithuania’s then negotiator, Russia was very different at that time and so was Lithuania’s attitude towards its big neighbour.
“For Russia, this was apparently not on their minds, they were preoccupied with their own problems, Vladimir Putin was consolidating power and EU enlargement was a secondary issue,” he believes.
If Moscow had wanted to sabotage the decommissioning process, Auštrevičius says, it could have used the staff at the Ignalina NPP, many of whom were Russians with “multiple” contacts with Russian special services.
“Admittedly, Lithuania was not in control of the Ignalina NPP even after it regained independence,” he says.
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