OH DEAR, oh dear, and indeed oh dear. According to reports in the Polish press, the situation regarding the proposed Ignalina nuclear power station may be somewhat more serious than anyone has had the nerve to suggest so far.

If the Polish edition of the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, there is both good news and bad news for Lithuania.

The good news is that the Poles are going to reduce the amount of wattage they will demand from the new reactor, having previously said that they would bugger off if they didn’t get at least a third of the total output.

The bad news is that they will reduce their demand to precisely zero and bugger off anyway.

Lithuanian Economy Minister Vytas Navickas says there are no indications that Poland is pulling out (insert your own hackneyed Catholic/birth control joke here), which is not to say that it won’t happen. After all, Poland’s government didn’t reveal that it wasn’t showing up to last year’s debacle of a signing session until the eleventh hour.

The Wall Street Journal Polska reported today that the new Polish government may be having a change of heart about the whole project, not that they have shown much willingness to commit to anything at all up to this point. Remember that at the Vilnius Energy Conference back in October, we were supposed to see a deal on a power bridge between Lithuania and Poland “within days”. We’re still waiting.

The jaw-jaw about Polish/Lithuanian involvement in Ignalina has been going in circles for over a year now. Both Latvia and (especially) Estonia are getting fed up waiting in the wings for the Grand Duckies down south to consummate their on-again, off-again relationship.

I suspect that confirmation of yet more dithering will be enough to make Estonia walk away from the deal altogether and decide to stick with their oil shale and link to Finland until they can participate fully in the next Finnish nuke station. They may face fines for the extra CO2 they’ll produce as a result, but they’ll also avoid getting dragged into a messy financial situation (Lithuania hasn’t even set up a proper company to move the project forward yet) that looks likely to deliver a second-rate facility (compared to the latest Finnish plants) massively over budget and laughably late. And who can blame them?
With Estonia doing its own thang, Latvia will either stick with the project with a heavy heart and its usual lack of decisiveness or decide that high-fallutin’ ideas of ‘Baltic unity’ have finally gone for a Burton and throw in its lot with Russia as its exclusive energy supplier.

That might not be quite such a bad move as Russophobes would paint it. Russia would be perfectly happy with the chance to drive a wedge between its least favourite Baltic states, and if it’s good enough for Germany to buddy up with the Kremlin, it’s probably good enough for Latvia. At least they’d know who they’d be dealing with for, ooh, the next thirty-five years or so. Maybe longer - Putin’s as fit as a fiddle, a fact that he never tires of reminding everyone.
And Poland? Well, with big energy deficits unlikely to cure themselves, particularly in the north east of the country, maybe Poland will decide that Nord Stream may not be such a bad thing after all and ask to get plugged into Germany instead of Lithuania? That’s a fairly unlikely scenario though. More likely they might just think that it would be quicker and simpler to build their own nuclear station(s) and take 100% of the energy. It’d be very expensive, but the rapidly-growing economy might be able to take the pain in the short run in order to ensure that growth continues in the long run.

All of which would leave Lithuanian scientists desperately looking for a way to generate electricity from eggs - because that’s what would be all over everyone’s faces.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Lithuania. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.