“Final information, a final proposal from the Energy Minister on the necessity and purpose of such a company will still have to be produced at the government’s meeting. Since there is a question – we have the company VAE, and one of the proposals says that this particular company could carry out this function,” he said in an interview to the public radio.
The decision should be taken at the government’s meeting on Wednesday, he said adding that the energy ministers of the Baltic countries should meet to discuss the nuclear facility project this week.
“Things will probably get much clearer after the ministers’ meeting,” Butkevičius said.
He reiterated that the Latvians and the Estonians did not see any economic return in the nuclear facility project worked out by the previous conservative government.
After the working group, set up by Butkevičius, has found that the nuclear power project is too expensive for Lithuania and that the price of electricity generated at the new facility may be non-competitive, the authorities say that the project could only be continued if its terms were improved for Lithuania through talks with Latvian and Estonian energy companies and Japan's Hitachi.
Butkevičius plans to discuss the outlook for the nuclear facility project with his Baltic counterparts in Riga on May 30.
Japan’s Hitachi was chosen as a strategic investor for the nuclear facility project in the summer of 2011. The plan worked out by the previous government called for the construction of a 1,380 MW reactor in Visaginas in cooperation with Hitachi, Latvia, and Estonia.
However, the non-binding referendum held in conjunction with general elections last October brought uncertainty as to the future of the project. The new government led by Butkevičius has made conflicting statements about the project and now says that the facility could be built if the authorities managed to negotiate better conditions for its implementation.
