If by 15 July Ignalina plant's administration fails to reach a formal agreement with the consortium of Germany's Nukem Technologies and GNS on how to solve the issue of suitability of nuclear spent fuel storage casks that are being supplied to the facility, international donor funding for the closure projects may be suspended.
This is what European Commission officials told Lithuania's representatives during an assembly of the International Ignalina Decommissioning Support Fund held recently in London, according to the paper.
Peter Faross, director for nuclear energy at the European Commission's Directorate General for Energy, reportedly said that in case of Ignalina plant's failure to agree with the contractors in the interim spent fuel storage facility construction project, known as B1, on how to solve the cask and crane suitability issues and on spent fuel characteristics, further implementation of the plant's closure projects, including the construction of a solid radioactive waste management and storage complex, known as B2/3/4, becomes meaningless.
However, an expert familiar with Ignalina plant affairs said that Lithuania should react more calmly to such statements by European Commission officials.
"Neither Faross nor his subordinates take decisions on when to finance INPP closure and when to suspend or discontinue the funding. This is a political-level issue. 15 July is not the first such deadline in this project," he told Verslo Žinios, adding that the international decommissioning support fund "is a dead structure that should have been dissolved a long time ago."
Ignalina plant spokespeople say that 150 casks manufactured by the GNS consortium, of which four have already been delivered to Visaginas, a town in eastern Lithuania where the facility is located, do not comply with the project's technical specifications and do not have the necessary certificates for use in the facility.
Last year, Ignalina plant and the Lithuanian Energy Ministry agreed to cover a 78-million-euro funding shortfall in the solid radioactive waste management and storage facility project.
