Lithuania failed to prevent a profitable Russian-Belarusian project
The state enterprise "Belarusian Nuclear Power Plant" was issued a permit from Gosatomnadzor to import fresh nuclear fuel into Belarus. Belrynok reported this today, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Fuel for the Belarusian NPP (a batch of 180 fuel assemblies, of which 163 are intended for initial loading into the reactor) was manufactured at the Russian TVEL plant in the fall of 2018.
This means that the nuclear power plant will be launched in the very near future. Most likely, closer to July 3 – Independence Day of Belarus.
This is not only a success of Russian-Belarusian cooperation (the station was built according to a Russian design by Russian specialists using Russian loans), but also a fiasco of Lithuania’s efforts to ban the nuclear power plant.
The small but proud Baltic republic tried in vain to turn the European Union against the Russian-Belarusian project. Even her sisters Latvia and Estonia are not averse to buying cheap electricity from Belarus.
Back on April 23, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda called his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko and convinced him to refuse to launch the nuclear power plant. Having failed to achieve success, he dialed Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky on April 27 and persuaded him not to buy electricity from Belarus. And today, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius complained about the US BelNPP and asked for support.
“We must work together to preserve a free and independent Belarus. The construction of the Ostrovets nuclear power plant contradicts economic logic, it imposes a huge economic burden on the country, and increases dependence on Russia,” says Linkevičius.
Indeed, the project contradicts economic logic, not Belarusian, but Lithuanian. Back in 2016, this Baltic republic was going to build its Visaginas nuclear power plant instead of the Soviet Ignalina nuclear power plant, which the Lithuanian authorities stopped in 2009 at the request of the European Union. However, American investors did not provide the promised funds for construction.
According to Forbes, there is one more circumstance: Lithuania has invested a lot of money in a gas liquefaction plant in Klaipeda. The construction of a Belarusian nuclear power plant means in the future the supply of cheaper energy, which can be exported to nearby countries. Moreover, in theory, the nuclear power plant is capable of knocking Lithuania out of the market altogether.
“Even if Lithuania’s fears about a “new Chernobyl” were sincere (which is hard to believe, since this country has operated its own Chernobyl-type reactor for decades, and in 2008, in a referendum, supported its preservation, despite EU demands to close it) , the risk of failure must be looked at in a broader context.
Lithuania needs to protect its own energy market, and this has turned them into visible opponents of nuclear energy. The main reason why Lithuania is trying to prevent any possible transit of electricity from Belarus through this country plus Poland, Latvia and Estonia is its share of the energy market,” Forbes writes.
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