Lithuania received bids from Westinghouse Electric Corp. and Japan’s Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy Ltd. to build a nuclear power plant after shutting the Soviet-era Ignalina facility at the end of 2009.
The government will select the winning bidder this summer as it seeks to replace Ignalina, which the European Union ordered to be closed because of its similar design to the Chernobyl reactor that exploded in 1986, the Vilnius-based Energy Ministry said in an e-mailed statement today.
The Baltic nation plans to open a new plant in Visaginas in 2020 as Germany aims to close its units there. Lithuanian support for nuclear energy has remained high after the Ignalina closure pushed up energy costs and increased dependence on Russian energy. Lithuania imports almost 50 percent of its power. Russian gas monopoly OAO Gazprom supplies all of its gas.
“This project has a strategic significance across the whole Baltic Region,” Westinghouse, the U.S.-based nuclear reactor builder owned by Toshiba Corp., said in an e-mailed statement today.
Westinghouse offered AP1000 reactor technology with a proposed capacity of 1,154 megawatts in output along with “a strong commercial proposal,” it said without elaborating.
German Chancellor Angel Merkel called on May 30 for the closure of 17 nuclear reactors by 2022 in light of the partial meltdown of Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant in Japan.
“For Lithuania and the whole region it is important to have independent capacity to generate electricity,” Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius told a news conference today. “Different countries have different solutions to these issues.”

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