Work on a stalled project to build a new nuclear reactor at Lithuania's Ignalina atomic power facility could begin this autumn, the country's president Valdas Adamkus said Friday.
"By the fall of this year we could start working, digging the ground (for Ignalina)," Adamkus said after a Friday meeting with the presidents of Estonia and Latvia.
"I'm committed (even) if it takes 24-hours work a day to end the delay," Adamkus said.
Under its 2004 deal to enter the European Union, Lithuania pledged to shut down its existing Soviet-era Ignalina nuclear power facility by 2010.
The new Ignalia power plant was originally due to be up and running by 2015, but is now officially targeted for 2018 due in part to disagreement with fellow ex-communist 2004 EU entrants and investors Estonia, Latvia and Poland over shares of power output.
"We are awaiting a decision and that's where we stand," Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said Friday.
Earlier this month Lithuania's Energy Minister Arvydas Sekmokas singled out Swedish energy group Vattenfall, Germany's RWE or E.ON, and France's EDF as being in the running for the construction contract for the four-nation nuclear power facility.
"Progress has been minimal, and it's hard to believe that it will be built as planned in 2018," he admitted at the time.
Experts suggest 2020 as a more realistic target for the plant's opening. tap-mas/uh/eb
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