Energy, EU – Baltic States, Financial Services, Lithuania, Nuclear power plant

"The decommissioning will cost around 3 billion euros in total. What worries me today is the position of the European Commission and the European Union that does not guarantee in principle that we will receive the rest of the funding – around 1.2 billion euros – up to the end (of the decommissioning process)," Darius Janulevicius said on LRT Radio.

"(For the period) starting from 2021, they try to maintain the position that the EU has contributed sufficiently to the decommissioning process and that Lithuania should finance the remaining part from other sources. That would be quite painful for Lithuania," he said.

The CEO said that this would put the decommissioning process on hold.

"We are speaking about the years 2026 to 2017, because we will be able to use funds from the current perspective. But if we have no funds afterwards, we will have to revise the decommissioning strategy from immediate to deferred dismantling," he said.

Audrius Kamienas, director of the Activity Planning and Finance Department at the INPP, said last month that lobbyist efforts were already underway to secure the required funding.

Deputy Energy Minister Rokas Baliukovas then said that active negotiations on additional EU funding for the Ignalina plant closure would start in 2017.

The INPP will use an estimated 650 million euros in EU funds during the 2014-2020 programming period.

The Ignalina plant, which was the first in the world to close Soviet-built RBMK-type reactors that are considered unsafe by the West, is to be fully decommissioned by 2038. Started in 2004, the closure process is estimated to cost around 2.6 billion euros in total.

In line with its EU accession commitments, Lithuania shut down the first unit of the Ignalina plant on the last day of 2004 and closed the second and last operating unit five years later.