Lithuanian minister says giving up nuclear energy was a mistake

Lithuania's decision to give up nuclear energy “was a big mistake”, the country's Energy Minister Dainius Kreivys said on Tuesday.

Closing the Ignalina nuclear power plant in northeastern Lithuania “was a mistake made by all of us", Kreivys told a joint meeting of the parliamentary Committee on Economic Affairs and the Commission for Energy and Sustainable Development.

Differently from the oil and LNG sector, Lithuania has failed to do its "homework" in the electricity sector, the energy minister said.

"Today we have a market price that is six to seven times higher, plus we have the Astravyets nuclear power plant” in Belarus, the minister said. The nuclear plant built by Russia’s Rosatom just 50 kilometres from Vilnius is considered unsafe by Lithuanian officials.

“If we had [a nuclear power plant], there would be no Astravyets. From the security point of view, I think the decision was really questionable, and I think there was a lot of misleading information in the political sphere at the time," Kreivys said.

Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Japan's Hitachi hoped to build a new nuclear power plant by 2020–2022 next to Lithuania's Ignalina nuclear facility which was shut down in late 2009.

The Lithuanian government had plans to start the construction in 2015 and for the new facility to start generating electricity by 2022 at the latest.

However, the project, planned by the then government led by the conservative Homeland Union, the current party in power, was scrapped after a 2012 referendum failed to secure public support for the project.