A historical survey of the Ignalina NPP

Full text: When the boom of nuclear power industry began in the former Soviet Union, the idea of constructing the Ignalina NPP occurred to the circles in Moscow's central institutions at the turn of the 1970s. The nuclear power plant remained a facility under all-union jurisdiction supervised by the Ministries of Atomic Energy and Medium-Machine Building of the USSR from September 16, 1971, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union adopted the resolution regarding the beginning of its construction, until Lithuania regained independence in 1990. Nuclear power is the basis of Lithuania's power industry. The Ignalina NPP is a product of the former Soviet Union. Two reactors of RBMK-1SOO type are operational at the Ignalina NPP. This is the most advanced and the most recent version of the RBMK reactor design series (only two reactors of this type have ever been built). The power plant was built as part of the Soviet Union's North-West Unified Power System rather than to meet Lithuania's needs. The first unit of Ignalina NPP was commissioned in late 1983, and the second one in August 1987. A total of four units with RBI/1K-1S00 reactors were to be built. However, due to political and safety motives the construction of the third unit was suspended as early as 1989. After Lithuania declared independence in 1990, the Ignalina NPP was still guarded by Soviet troops and KGB operatives, and remained under the jurisdiction of the Soviet Union until August 1991. Supervision was carried out by that country's regulatory authority, the State Nuclear Power Supervision Inspection (Gosatomnadzor). It was only after the political events of August 1991 in Moscow that the Ignalina NPP finally came under the authority of the Lithuanian Republic. It is now controlled administratively by the Lithuanian Ministry of Economy, and its supervision is carried out by the Lithuanian State Nuclear Power Safety Inspectorate (VAlESI). This paper will present brief information about the Ignalina NPP, information how the Ignalina NPP came into being, about prerequisites for the construction of the Ignalina NPP, about work on constructing the NPP and protests of the academic community, about speeding up the construction of the Ignalina NPP with an energy crisis imminent and the debate on termination of Unit 3 construction. The material on appearance of the Ignalina NPP and problems related to it is collected at the Special Archive of Lithuania, and the Central State Archive of Lithuania. The Special Archive of Lithuania has been using fund No. 1771 of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party whose documents mostly reflect the activities of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party in supervising the construction of this All-Union facility. The fund contains, among other things, documents of correspondence with different All-Union institutions reflecting Moscow's position on the issue. Resolutions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union whose second copies are stored in the archive have also been used for the present survey. Only the minutes of the meetings that were held in Moscow were sent to Lithuania; the shorthand records and primary material are absent. Nearly all the quoted documents were marked as top secret, which shows that the Ignalina NPP was a facility of extreme importance to both Moscow and Vilnius, as in the 1970s and 1980s most of the Communist Party's documents were marked simply as secret. Fund No. R-754 of the Managing Department of the Council of Ministers of the Lithuanian SSR was also studied in the Central State Archive of Lithuania. Unfortunately, very few documents related to the subject under consideration remain there. The files of the 1976-87 period on construction of the Ignalina NPP and issues related to it are completely absent, although nearly all the resolutions of 1974-75 remain. The originals of the bulk of the documents are also missing, only their copies have been preserved. The situation is even worse at the archive of the former State Planning Committee of the LSSR, whose documents were not handed over to the Central State Archive of Lithuania after 1963. This archive mostly contains the correspondence with the State Planning Committee of the USSR. (author)