The members of the parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control will travel to the Ignalina plant in eastern Lithuania and will meet with lawmakers and Foreign Ministry officials in Vilnius during their visit scheduled for Apr. 4-6, the European Parliament Information Office has confirmed to BNS.
With EU bodies starting discussions on the bloc’s 2021-202 budget, the Lithuanian government is seeking to obtain funding for the Ignalina plant’s decommissioning projects in the new financing period.
In line with its EU accession commitments, Lithuania shut down the first unit of the Soviet-era facility, which was considered unsafe by the West, in late 2004 and closed the second unit at the end of 2009. It may take several more decades to fully decommission the plant.
The decommissioning process has recently attracted public attention due to law-enforcement suspicions that the INNP’s top executives ran a non-transparent auction of the plant’s assets and calls by some politicians to remove Nukem, a company owned by Russia’s nuclear energy giant Rosatom, from the closure projects.