Dec 8, 2009, 14:08 GMT
Vilnius - Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite embarked on an inspection tour Tuesday of her country's soon-to-be decommissioned and only nuclear power plant, at the same time the government was due to issue an official tender for its replacement.
'In about three years' time, or four years at the latest, construction on the new atomic power station will begin,' she said at a press conference in the town of Visaginas, which lies close to the Ignalina nuclear power plant.
The Ignalina facility came online in 1983, when the Baltic states were still part of the Soviet Union, but the decommissioning of the plant's Chernobyl-type reactors was one of the conditions under which Lithuania joined the European Union in 2004.
The sole remaining reactor - the other was shut down five years ago - will be switched off on December 31, leaving Lithuania reliant on energy supplies from other countries including Russia for around ten years.
During her visit Grybauskaite said Visaginas and its surrounding towns, which rely upon the nuclear power plant for employment, could not be simply abandoned for the best part of a decade.
'Until the construction of a new nuclear power plant, the state must not only find an alternative to nuclear energy, but must also develop new activites... for these municipalities. Life in the region can not be dependent on one company,' Grybauskaite said.
Meanwhile in Brussels the Lithuanian government launched its search for a strategic investor to build a replacement plant with the publication of a public tender in the Official Journal of the European Union.
Energy Minister Arvydas Sekmokas has approved the terms of a tender for the designing, construction, operation and decommissioning of a new nuclear power plant.
Speaking on Lithuanian radio Tuesday he said the tendering process would probably come down to a choice between two companies.
'After going through all the bidding stages, we could hold parallel negotiations with the two presenting the best offers,' he said.
Lithuania hopes to attract bids from companies including EDF, E.ON, GDF Suez, Enel, Iberdrola, RWE, and Vattenfall for the project which would also be backed by fellow EU member states Estonia, Latvia and Poland, who will share the energy generated. Bids will be accepted until the end of January 2010.
The total cost of the new plant is estimated to be between 6 and 15 billion euros (9-22 billion dollars) depending on the number and type of reactors selected. Lithuania hopes to have the new plant on stream by 2020.
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