Poland to participate in construction of new nuclear power plant in Lithuania - Polish Foreign Min

Poland will take part in the construction of a new nuclear power plant in Lithuania, Polish Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga said in Vilnius.

"Poland expects that a decision on signing an agreement on this issue at government level will be made in the near future," Fotyga said at a Tuesday press conference summing up the results of her meetings with Lithuanian government officials.

Last spring, the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian prime ministers signed an agreement formalizing their intention to jointly build a new nuclear power plant on the site of the current Ignalina plant, which is subject to closure under Lithuania's EU accession agreement. Warsaw later expressed its desire to join the project.
The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry's press service reported that Fotyga and her Lithuanian counterpart, Petras Vaitekunas, agreed that "the four countries involved in the construction of a new nuclear power plant should make a final political decision [on Poland's accession to this project] at the governmental level and instruct energy companies to immediately start implementing the project."

Lithuania's Vaitekunas admitted the importance of Poland's involvement in the construction of the nuclear power plant, saying that "this four-party energy project is significant not only in commercial, but above all in geopolitical terms and in terms of national security."

The heads of the Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, and Polish energy systems agreed at a meeting in Warsaw in early January to take specific steps to integrate Poland into the project. They signed a joint protocol on forming a four-party working expert group to clear the way to the inclusion of the Polish energy company Polskie Sieci Elektroenergetyczne (PSE) into the project. However, no political decision has yet been made on this issue.

Lithuania stopped one of the two power units at the Ignalina nuclear power plant at the end of 2004 and pledged to completely shut the plant down by 2009. The Lithuanian leadership made the decision to build one or two new Western-made reactors on the basis of the Ignalina plant by 2015.
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