Abstract
Somewhere between Universe and Construction Workers' streets, schoolchildren have painted a mural depicting a rainbow, a lake, and–of course–a nuclear power plant. Welcome to Visaginas, Lithuania, home of the Ignalina power plant, the only Chernobyl-style civil nuclear facility on European Union (EU) soil. Ignalina is at the center of a bitter controversy between a small, nuclear-dependent country and an international community with grave safety concerns.
In spite of assurances that it would meet the deadline for closing the first of the two reactors at Ignalina, last November Lithuania came dangerously close to breaching the agreement it reached in 2002 to join the EU. But government officials eventually backed down, agreeing to go through with the closure.
The local establishment believes the plant's Soviet-era design is safe, and it has made few plans for alternate energy sources, leading some to wonder just how long the second reactor at this nuclear dinosaur will be allowed to continue operating.
The nuclear past
After years of tense, emotional negotiations over Ignalina, a massive facility tucked away in the country's extreme northeastern corner, the former Soviet republic of Lithuania joined the EU in May 2004. In the final deal–which required an entire extra chapter in Lithuania's final accession treaty–Brussels extracted a promise that both reactors at the plant would close by 2009. The agreement was hailed as a diplomatic and environmental success and a possible blueprint for phasing out 12 other Soviet-style reactors in Russia and Ukraine.
Powering down: Workers leave the Ignalina power plant on December 30, 2004, a day before one of its reactors was shut off.
It was a difficult pill to swallow; Ignalina supplies roughly 75 percent of the nation's electricity, making it the most nuclear-dependent country in the world. To soften the blow, the EU promised a hefty aid package, even by Brussels's standards. The Lithuanian government will receive at least 1.3 billion euros through 2013, and EU regulators have left the door open to giving as much as 700 million euros later on.
The intense political and economic interest Europe has shown in pulling the plug on Ignalina has been fueled by expert opinion that the plant's anachronistic design could pose a serious threat to the entire continent. Ignalina's two RBMK reactors are of the same type that caused the catastrophic Chernobyl disaster in 1986. It is widely accepted that the Soviet scientists who created the RBMK design placed safety near the bottom of their priorities. The Soviet authorities also saved money by using cheaper, less-enriched fuel than their Western counterparts.
Ignalina was no exception to the Soviet appetite for huge, dual-use facilities. Its two RBMK-1500 model reactors are the most powerful in the world, and even when operating at a fraction of their capacity they supply electricity to four countries. Before ground was broken in 1978, the plan was to build 10 reactors on the site, which would have pumped out an astounding 10 million kilowatts–enough electricity for approximately 40 million people.
After Chernobyl, upgrades and retrofits were immediately implemented in all RBMK reactors across the Soviet Union, eliminating many of the most troubling problems. But while Ignalina and its counterparts have undergone decades of work on internal design, many European scientists believe it is simply impossible to solve the most lingering–and visible–safety problem.
Unlike reactors in North America and Western Europe, Ignalina's reactors lack a physical containment structure–a thick wall of reinforced concrete that would contain any radioactive material released in case of accident. When the Western European Nuclear Regulators Association issued its 2000 report on nuclear safety in countries seeking EU membership, it determined that while the likelihood of a malfunction in Ignalina's reactors had decreased, “weaknesses remain with respect to the last barrier for protection of the environment, especially in case of a severe accident,” a reference to the absence of a concrete shield. Moreover, Ignalina's behemoth reactors are too large to accommodate the construction of a barrier, meaning that the plant can never reach Western safety standards.
According to many in Lithuania, though, the concerns cited by the nuclear regulators, which were repeated in a 2001 report by the Council of the European Union, miss the mark.
“I can assure you that this plant runs safely,” Viktor Shevaldin, Ignalina's general director, told me. According to Shevaldin, renovations in both reactors have brought standards up to acceptable levels.
The life atomic: A radiation monitor (top) and a nuclear mural in Visaginas.
More important, Shevaldin said, the containment systems in place at the plant, while not of a typically Western design, would suffice in case of an accident. “It would be too expensive and impractical to build a concrete barrier, but this is not important, since our present barriers are practically just as effective.”
Other scientists are not convinced. Rimvydas Jasiulionis, director of the independent Ignalina Monitoring Station, run by the Lithuanian Physics Institute, believes the plant should be shut down as soon as possible. “The one-and-a-half-ton iron blocks covering the fuel rods were not enough to contain radioactive material at Chernobyl, which means this design is not fully secured,” he says.
But in a place where so much depends on a single source of electricity, the debate on the plant's fate has inevitably spilled over from the scientific community into society at large.
Political magnetism
Walking down the oddly named streets of Visaginas, it is easy to appreciate Lithuania's precarious historical moment. On the one hand, entering the EU was the fulfillment of a decades-long dream of rejoining the West. Yet Visaginas's atom-shaped street lamps and towering khrushchevkas–the drab apartment blocks made popular under the reign of Nikita Khrushchev–are reminders that the attitudes adopted during 50 years of Soviet rule persist. This cold and isolated town, built in the 1970s to house Ignalina's scientists and engineers, is inhabited mostly by Russian speakers. Their children play on atomic-themed playground equipment; the digital clock display in front of town hall alternates current radioactivity readings with time and temperature.
The Lithuanian public views the nuclear power plant as a strategic national resource rather than a disaster waiting to happen, an idea that has changed little since the days when Soviet generals convinced citizens that massive nuclear projects were the hallmark of an advanced society.
This popular sympathy for the plant's continuing operation has not gone unnoticed by the country's politicians, perhaps explaining why the government hedges on the question of whether it will meet its international obligation to close the plant.
The most recent impasse in closure proceedings nearly caused a meltdown in Lithuania's relations with Brussels. In the course of the October 2004 parliamentary elections, Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas announced he would keep the plant's first reactor working beyond its closure deadline at the end of the year. Voters rewarded him by returning him to the country's most powerful office.
Only after the European Commission coldly reminded Brazauskas that the decommissioning was “enshrined in Lithuania's accession treaty” did the prime minister retract the statement he made weeks before.
Arturas Dainius, the state secretary at Lithuania's Economy Ministry, which is in charge of plant closure, said that “the elections didn't play the least significant role” in the government's stance. “You know,” he added, “all sorts of ‘interesting’ ideas can pop up from the political arena.”
Yet the conditions that instigated the eleventh-hour crisis over closing the first reactor will be dwarfed by the potentially catastrophic issues Lithuania will face as it prepares to close the second reactor by the end of 2008–another theoretically “enshrined” date. The energy produced by the first reactor was almost all sent abroad, but the final closure will leave Lithuania able to produce only 25 percent of its current electrical output, leaving a massive void in the country's energy supply.
With government officials admitting they have no definite plan to replace the supply from the second reactor, the hoped-for on-time closure seems doubtful. Casual proposals abound, but precious few official ideas have surfaced on how to use the aid from Brussels. “We'll either have to become an energy importer or build another plant, in which case we'll have to decide what type of plant that will be,” said Dainius. Only nebulous suggestions have been discussed so far.
Lithuania's power grid has yet to be connected to the rest of the EU, meaning imported electricity would have to come from Russia–an unpopular move in a country sensitive to the giant bear's long reach. And the prospect of bringing a new nuclear reactor online in less than four years seems dim given the government's sluggish pace of decision making. “Sooner or later the reactor is going to have to close, so why don't we make sound plans for its closure now?” Jasiulionis asked.
In the meantime, even government officials do not sound confident that the second reactor will be closed. “We'll live, and we'll see,” Dainius told me.