"There was approval on Monday for Lietuvos Energija to continue working with Latvia and Estonia and answer the questions they ask. There are a lot of those questions from our partners. They (the questions) are correct and necessary, I believe, because this is a huge investment," Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevičius told reporters after the political council's meeting.
Butkevičius said that it would take time to provide answers to the questions.
"The list of questions written is very long and it will really take time to answer these questions. However, certain initial work between the three Baltic states in terms of a common energy market has been achieved. But in order to have final decisions, there is still a lot of work to be done," he said.
With the Lithuanian government due to make its final decision on Visaginas nuclear power plant, Energy Minister Jaroslav Neverovič last Wednesday submitted a joint position of three Baltic energy companies and Japan's Hitachi, the strategic investor, on the project to Butkevičius.
The prime minister then said that he saw possibilities to improve the project, but added that this issue was yet to be discussed by the political council and the government.
A joint position of the Baltic governments on the Visaginas project is expected to be discussed at a meeting of the three countries' ministers in November.
A working group appointed by Butkevičius concluded last spring that the nuclear power project, in its current form, was too expensive for Lithuania and that the price of electricity generated at the new facility might be non-competitive.
The authorities then said that the project could only be continued if its terms and conditions were improved through talks with Latvian and Estonian energy companies and Japan's Hitachi.
President Dalia Grybauskaitė has said that Lithuania starts to look "pathetic" to the international community due to its failure to make decisions on the new nuclear power plant.
