“Lithuania has submitted a list of works and, as far as I know, the European Commission does not question that list, that is, it does not remove any task from that list, which should be implemented in the new financial framework. It’s just that the Commission is reducing the amount of money. I would not give too much prominence to the European Commission’s proposal now and would simply urge the government and all officials to spare no efforts in continuing with the talks,” the former diplomat, who now lectures at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University, said in an interview with the Lithuanian Radio.
Brussels had proposed to allocate less money for the Soviet-era INPP between 2014 and 2017 due to sluggish implementation and supervision of multi-billion-litas decommissioning projects, he said. In his view, the responsibility for that should be assumed both by the customer, i.e. the INPP, and the contractor, i.e. Russian-owned German company Nukem.
“The reasons concern both the contractor’s work and the customer’s work. Initially the contracts on two key facilities were signed in 2005 and those structures had to be completed in 2009. They have not been finished yet and they might possibly be finished by 2014 according to provisional timetables,” Švedas said.
Meanwhile, INPP CEO Žilvinas Jurkšus said that Lithuania would find it difficult to proceed with the decommissioning of INPP with lower EU funding. He warned that the facility would become unsafe due to insufficient funding.
“It can certainly be said so,” he said in response to the question whether INPP would become unsafe if insufficient funding was allocated.
Lithuania estimates that it needs around 770 million euros for Ignalina plant's decommissioning until 2020 and a total of 1.5 billion euros until 2030. Meanwhile the European Union (EU) has proposed to allocate 210 million euros for the decommissioning of the facility by 2017 and to discontinue funding for this project thereafter.
Lithuania has been allocated 1.37 billion litas for the decommissioning of INPP until 2013.
