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

Photo: iae.lt

Cold tests had shown that the facility complied with the requirements and was ready for the so-called hot tests involving radioactive waste, the INPP said in a press release on June 20th.

Some 7,175 spent fuel assemblies were now stored in the spent fuel pool of the first reactor and another 7,246 assemblies – in the spent fuel pool of the second unit, Natalija Survila-Glebova, spokeswoman for the INPP, told BNS. The first reactor was fully unloaded back in 2009 while the second one still contained 1,134 assemblies, she added.

With the storage facility put in operation in 2017, the assemblies remaining in the second unit will be unloaded and moved to the facility by 2022.

The storage facility has been built by a German consortium of Nukem Technologies and GNS.

The Ignalina plant, which was the first in the world to close Soviet-built RBMK-type reactors that are considered unsafe by the West, is to be fully decommissioned by 2038.

In line with its EU accession commitments, Lithuania shut down the plant's first unit on the last day of 2004 and closed its second and last operating unit five years later.