Lithuania shuts down unit one of its Chernobyl-style Ignalina nuclear power plant on New Year’s Eve, as it moves to honour a promise to the EU to close the facility in the coming years

Under the agreement, which secured the republic its membership earlier this year of the EU bloc, Lithuania closes the first unit on Friday and is scheduled to close the remaining unit in 2009. The EU has been worried about safety at the Ignalina plant, as it operates the same kind of reactors as in Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear plant, which exploded in 1986 in the world’s worst civil nuclear disaster. The EU has promised to finance the closure of the plant, estimated at 2-3 billion euros (2.5-3.75 billion dollars) over 30 years and has already allocated more than 200 million euros to prepare decommissioning of the first unit. The Ignalina plant, which supplies about 70 per cent of all energy consumed in the Baltic states, operates two Chernobyl-type RBMK reactors with 1300 Megawatt capacity each.