Stronger nuclear power standards demanded

  • 2011-04-27
  • From wire reports

VILNIUS - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia will draft legislation that would prevent the marketing of electricity produced by unsafe nuclear power plants, reports news agency ELTA. Such an initiative is also being discussed at the level of the entire European Union (EU).

Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius presented the initiative in Kiev, at the conference of donor countries dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. The conference was also attended by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin. “I had to repeat myself once and again that it would not be allowed to trade electricity produced by unsafe nuclear plants in the market of the Baltic States. We will draft and approve the corresponding laws together with our colleagues in Latvia and Estonia in the short run, and talks are also held at the EU level,” Kubilius said in an interview to the Ziniu Radijas on April 21.

In the conference, Kubilius sat next to the Russian deputy prime minister, and said that he voiced Lithuania’s position on Russia’s plans to build a nuclear plant near Lithuania, in the Kaliningrad region. The Lithuanian prime minister said he did not see any Belarusian officials.

“My neighbor at the table, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Sechin, reacted rather violently and emotionally to my observations about the nuclear plant projects in the Kaliningrad region and Belarus which fail to meet international conventions, and claimed that the technologies in the project were very safe,” said Kubilius. The prime minister said it was very important to explain the position at the moment when the international community and the EU were drafting a number of additional safety measures. Kubilius said that most of the delegates in the conference expressed concern and determination to raise nuclear safety standards significantly, and that safety tests would be carried out not only in the plants of the EU states, but also in the neighboring countries.

The Kiev conference was attended by a number of high-ranking world leaders, including Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations (UN), President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso and French Prime Minister Francois Fillon.