Energy, EU – Baltic States, Legislation, Lithuania, Nuclear power plant

Darius Janulevicius, CEO of the INPP, told BNS on Friday that the agreement would be signed in London on Tuesday.

"There will be intensive work to be done. There is a timetable. It will start next year," he told BNS when asked what work would have to be done under the agreement and when the casks would be delivered to Visaginas, a town in eastern Lithuania where the plant is located.

Natalija Survila-Glebova, the plant's spokeswoman, told BNS that a supplement to an agreement was planned to be signed in London, saying that more information would be provided after the signing of the document.

Mantas Dubauskas, an advisor to the energy minister, told BNS that the supplement would set out a new timetable, under which the storage facility would have to be operational by the end of 2017, and would provide for a mutual waiver of claims. He did not specify the possible amount of these claims.

According to Janulevicius, the total value of the plant's agreement with the Nukem-GNS consortium on the construction and equipment of the interim spent nuclear fuel storage facility, known as B1, remains unchanged at 193.5 million euros.

It has been reported that GNS has already manufactured 154 spent nuclear fuel casks. Four of the casks have been delivered to Visaginas, but they are not fit for use and one is defective.

The Ignalina plant and the German consortium signed the decommissioning contract back in 2005, but it has been repeatedly modified to push back completion dates.