Lithuania standing firm against sales of electricity from Belarus’ new nuclear power station
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Lithuania spurns Baltic presidents’ meeting amid nuclear power rift KURESSAARE, Saaremaa, Estonia (Reuters) 25 June 20, – Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda refused to attend a planned meeting with his Estonian and Latvian counterparts on Thursday, saying he did so after the countries failed to agree to ban electricity purchases from a new nuclear power plant in Belarus. Lithuania has a law banning all Belarusian power sales after the power plant gets operational. The Estonian president’s office, which hosted the meeting, said that Nauseda, who is dealing with a reshuffle of his team, “decided to stay home at the last minute due to internal affairs”. Lithuania wants all the three countries to sign up to banning sales of Belarusian electricity after the nuclear plant comes online, binning an earlier draft agreement that only pledged to help keep the energy from being sold in Lithuania……. Lithuania sees the nuclear power plant, built by Russia’s Atomstroyexport near its capital and financed by Moscow with a $10 billion loan, as threat to its safety and national security, something Belarus disagrees with. “The President’s opinion is that negotiations should be finished first,” Nauseda’s spokesman told Reuters in a statement.https://www.reuters.com/article/us-baltics-energy-belarus/lithuania-spurns-baltic-presidents-meeting-amid-nuclear-power-rift-idUSKBN23W27C |
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Lithuania, Belarus sign nuclear incident notification agreement
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Lithuania, Belarus sign nuclear incident notification agreement
Source: Xinhua| 2020-05-26 01:02:32|Editor: huaxia VILNIUS, May 25 — The nuclear safety authorities of Lithuania and Belarus signed an agreement on early notification of a nuclear accident and on the exchange of important nuclear safety information, Lithuania’s State Nuclear Power Safety Inspectorate (VATESI) announced here on Monday.
In order to protect the public by minimizing the potential radiation-related risks and consequences, the two authorities agreed to exchange key information immediately after a nuclear incident or when the monitoring systems indicate a radiation dose-rate level that could be hazardous to the public health, said a VATESI press release. ….. Lithuania’s authorities have regularly raised questions about the environmental and nuclear safety of the Ostrovets nuclear power plant in Belarus…..http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-05/26/c_139087159.htm |
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Belarus to get a new nuclear reactor along with $10 billion debt to Russia
In January, Lithuanian Energy Minister Zygimantas Vaiciunas told RFE/RL that the Belarusian plant is “a threat to our national security, public health, and environment.”
“The key question is the site selection, which was done politically — geopolitically,” Vaiciunas told RFE/RL.
Plans for the nuclear plant were unveiled by Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka in 2008 when Minsk received a $10 billion loan from Moscow for the project.
The general contractor for the Belarusian nuclear power plant building is Atomstroiexport, an affiliate of Russia’s state-owned Rosatom. Based on reporting by TASS, ONT, and RFE/RL correspondent Matthew Luxmoore
Belarus to swap gas dependence on Moscow for nuclear dependence on Moscow
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Belarus to swap gas dependence on Moscow for nuclear dependence on Moscow https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2020-03-belarus-to-swap-gas-dependence-on-moscow-for-nuclear-dependence-on-moscowA nuclear power plant built to lessen Belarus’s dependence on Moscow for natural gas – but constructed and lavishly financed by Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom – is due to begin operation later this year, officials in the Belarus capital of Minsk have said. March 24, 2020 by Charles Digges
A nuclear power plant built to lessen Belarus’s dependence on Moscow for natural gas – but constructed and lavishly financed by Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom – is due to begin operation later this year, officials in the Belarus capital of Minsk have said. The plant will feature two VVER-1200 reactors – the second of which will come online next year – that will together generate some 2.4 gigawatts of power in the cloistered post-Soviet dictatorship on Russia’s western border. The International Atomic Energy Agency found that the plant largely fulfilled general safety guidelines and issued a number of recommendations for improvement. Others have raised alarm over potential safety issues. GlobalData quoted energy and nuclear policy analyst Mycle Schneider as warning: “Neighboring countries have voiced concern over the lack of review of some serious safety concerns, and Lithuania has transmitted an official note to the European Council.” Since its inception in the early 2000s, the Belarus nuclear power plant, in Ostrovets near the border of Lithuania, has been fraught with difficulties. Environmentalists who oppose the plant are routinely harassed and stifled and in some cases kicked out of the country. Neighboring Lithuania, once seen as a promising potential market when construction began, is now so opposed to the plant that its parliament outlawed purchasing any electricity it produces and has sent envoys to other countries encouraging them to do the same. Poland and the Ukraine have also spoken out against the plant. Each of these groups have called attention to the mishaps that have plagued the plant during its construction, including an incident in 2016 when technicians inadvertently dropped a 330-ton reactor pressure vessel – which houses the core – from a crane. A replacement unit sent to the site was accidentally run into a column at a railway station when it arrived. But the plant also illustrates an energy conundrum facing many European countries. While a number of nations in the old Soviet orbit seek to diversify their energy supplies away from Russian natural gas, Rosatom is more than willing to step into the vacuum left by that shift. By offering huge loans to build and supply nuclear power plants, Rosatom can keep customers financially and technically beholden to Moscow for as long as 50 years. With other kinds of power infrastructure, a contractor builds a facility and leaves it to be operated by the country where it stands. Not so with nuclear power plants, where foreign government customers, like Belarus, remain dependent on Rosatom – and thus the Russian state – for fuel, know-how and eventual decommissioning works. That geopolitical strategy is not lost on Lithuania, whose prime minister recently told the New York Times that: “The [Ostrovets} nuclear plant is an example of Russia’s desire to keep states along its borders in its orbit at all costs – it helps them preserve more influence.” The policy is has broad implications. Rosatom has convinced dozens of countries to sign memorandums of understanding on all manner of nuclear services, from research and training facilities to nuclear power plant construction. As a result, Rosatom says that its portfolio of foreign projects has swelled to more than $200 billion. But that figure invites skepticism. Many of the counties Rosatom counts toward that figure – like Ethiopia, Algeria, Nigeria, Sudan and Rwanda – won’t be ready to support nuclear power on their grids for decades. Others where Rosatom builds are already underway – like India’ Kudankulam, Iran’s Bushehr and China’s Tianwan – are already familiar with Rosatom’s typical cost overruns and delays. Furthermore, a deep dig into Rosatom’s claimed income by the Russian environmental group Ecodefence revealed that business wasn’t going quite as indicated. A report by the group, published last year, detailed a number of cases where the corporation misstated the worth of its overseas reactor construction projects, and inflated their worth by several billion dollars. Still, the corporation is an ambitious and successful presence on the international market. According to one study, cited by the New York Times, Rosatom has sold more nuclear technology abroad since 1999 than the United States, France, China, South Korea and Japan combined. Rosatom’s approach to marketing its reactors is distinct from its western competitors because it offers to finance, build and operate the plants that it builds abroad. These generous terms come thanks to the enormous state subsidies Rosatom receives – and which it can then funnel into loans that boost its profits on paper. The Belarus plant, for instance, comes thanks to a $10 million line of credit from Rosatom. Hungary, a member of the EU, became another customer when it took an $11 billion loan to build its Paks II in 2016. Rosatom also won a $30 billion contract for four reactors in Egypt, and another big nuclear plant deal in Turkey. While it’s tempting to see a strategy afoot in Rosatom’s foreign projects, the Kremlin insists it’s just business. President Vladimir Putin has publicly distanced himself from mixing politics with foreign commerce. |
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Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania oppose energy imports from a Belarusian nuclear power plant
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Emerging Europe 13th Feb 2020. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are joining forces to oppose energy imports from a Belarusian nuclear power plant (NPP) Lithuania has declared a national security threat. The governments of the three Baltic nations have announced that they will sign a declaration of intent to oppose electricity purchases from Russian-built NPP at Astravets near the Lithuanian border.
We are pleased to be moving closer to a common position,”
Lithuania’s prime minister Saulius Skvernelis told reporters, adding that the three Baltic nations and the European Commission will work on finding “an appropriate mechanism controlling the origin of electricity entering our networks from third countries”.https://emerging-europe.com/news/baltic-states-will-not-buy-energy-from-belarus-npp/ |
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Anxiety in Belarus and Lithuania, over new Chernobyl-style nuclear power station
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They may not tell you the whole truth’: Fears of another Chernobyl as Russian-built atomic power station set to open in Belarus, Independent, 20 Jan 2020 Three decades after world’s worst nuclear disaster, the country most affected by the fall out is set to open its first nuclear plant. But as Oliver Carroll finds out, not everyone is pleased It was when the tree fellers arrived in early 2009 with their bulldozers that Nikolai Ulasevich, a local activist, knew the game was up. There might not have been a published order to build an atomic power station in the fields overlooking his homestead in the village of Vornyany – but a decision had clearly been made. In authoritarian Belarus those decisions rarely have a reverse gear. In the years that followed, Ulasevich watched as the gigantic cooling towers and system blocks of Belarus’s first nuclear power station took shape. Construction, which was led by the Russian state nuclear agency Rosatom, would be far from straightforward. A string of incidents delayed its opening, but the first reactor is finally due to go online early 2020. To say the construction of the Belarusian nuclear plant has been controversial would be to trivialise the history of these lands. Chernobyl lies only seven miles from Belarus’s southern border, and the nuclear accident, still the world’s worst, has left the deepest of scars locally. The direction of the wind in spring 1986 – and the Soviet authorities’ decision to avoid major harm in Moscow – meant Belarus suffered more than any other region in the union. At the moment that the radioactive clouds moved towards the capital, air force pilots were ordered to chase down the toxic clouds and seed them with jets of silver iodide. Much of the southernmost region of Homel remains seriously contaminated, with elevated oncology levels as a result. Any local over 50 can recall what they were doing on those dry, spring-summer days. They talk about the tiredness; the strange, dryness of the mouth; the rumours that it might be a good idea to take iodine, but the lack of reliable information. They will also tell you about a cloud of secrecy almost as harmful as the black cumulus masses that had their radioactive bowels emptied over southern Belarus. …….. “The thought of what happened back in 1986 can’t fail to make you anxious about what may happen. You know they may not tell you the whole truth.” Lithuania, the European nation that borders Belarus just 10 miles west of Astravets, is bitterly opposed to the nuclear plant. It says it has not been properly consulted and claims the plant breaches post-Fukushima distance guidelines – in particular, a recommendation that nuclear power stations should not be built closer than 100km of major conurbations. The new nuclear plant lies just 30 miles east of the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. The Lithuanians say they are preparing for any eventuality: from stockpiling iodine tablets to opening up nuclear bunkers and issuing survival notes to their citizens. In October, authorities ran a major preparedness operation, imitating a disaster response to a nuclear meltdown. The drills were knowingly hyperbolic. But several reported incidents do give pause for thought. From what we know, the reactor vessel in Belarus has already been involved in at least two accidents. The first was in July 2016, when it was apparently dropped from a crane during installation. Belarusian authorities took weeks to admit a “minor” incident. Five months later, a replacement reactor vessel collided with a railway pylon while being transported. At least five workers have died in construction accidents. There was at least one fire incident in the control room. The outside world would likely have stayed little the wiser were it not for the opposition activist Ulasevich monitoring from his modest home, which he shares with his wife, a few chickens and sheep, three miles away from the new power station. He said he found out about the dropped reactor vessel in conversation with a local construction worker. “He swore that he saw it break free of ropes at a height of two or three metres,” he says. ……. Yury Voronezhtsev, the man who led the official Soviet official response to Chernobyl, says he could not believe any statement that the plant was “safe”. “I don’t believe that our Belarusian construction workers are any better than the Soviet ones,” he tells The Independent. “We have the same people, and the same systems………. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/chernobyl-belarus-nuclear-power-station-atomic-vornyany-rosatom-ostrovets-astravets-a9271811.html
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Belarus’ forgotten children – victims of Chernobyl’s nuclear radiation
Kevin Barry in Chernobyl: ‘Misha is an example of what happens when a country is on its knees’ Irish Examiner, August 05, 2019
In 2000 the Irish Examiner sent Kevin Barry, now longlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel Night Boat to Tangier, to Chernobyl. Here we reproduce what he reported
Misha photographed by Eugene Kolzov at the No 1 orphanage in Minsk.Misha, aged seven, is the victim of not one but many sicknesses. His physical disorders, as can be plainly seen, are many and various.
But Misha is the victim of another ailment too, a kind of compassion deficiency.
Chernobyl isn’t fashionable these days, it’s been around so long now. April 26, 1986 seems a long time in the way-distant past. After the initial blurt of paranoia and charitable outreach, the fickle gaze of public interest quickly flicked from the incident at Reactor No 4 to fresher horrors.
Misha, then, has been shuffled way back in the compassion pack. He has fallen behind the other ravaged children who sombrely people the planet’s trouble spots, in places like Mozambique and Ethiopia.
He’s competing with Rwanda and Chechnya. And it’s beginning to tell Misha’s illness is a direct consequence of the Chernobyl explosion.
The radioactive danger in Belarus is not so much in the air now as in the food chain. Professor Yuri Bandashevsky, a dissident scientist, told the Irish Examiner this week that the mutations caused by radiation in children like Misha have by now entered the gene pool and thus the effects of the ‘86 explosion can stretch to infinity.
After criticising the state’s alleged misspending of research money for Chernobyl, Professor Bandashevsky recently found himself banged up in jail for five months, bound at the feet.
Which isn’t the sort of thing that bodes well for the likes of Misha. Some aid continues to filter through. This week, a convoy run by the Chernobyl Children’s Project has been on a drive through Belarus, dispensing almost £2 million in food and medicines.
One of the institutions the orphanage supports is Novinki, a children’s asylum on the outskirts of Minsk. Such is its Dickensian squalor, its actual existence was long denied by the state. This is where you’ll find little Misha.
Project leader Adi Roche says she has known the child since he was a baby, but has been stunned at his deterioration since she last visited in December.
After finding him emaciated and dying this week, the project has placed a Dublin nurse and a local Chernobyl nurse on 24-hour care alert with Misha, an attempt to make whatever is left of his life as painless as possible
“We don’t know how long Misha will live, or if he will live, but we are morally obliged to do everything in our power to attempt saving his life,” said Ms Roche last night.
“‘He is not the only child in Belarus suffering as horrifically as this. he’s just one of many.” she added. “‘These children are the victims of 14 years of neglect by the international community.”’
Many children in Belarus consigned to mental asylums have no mentaI handicap. “All orphaned children with any kind of disability are put into mental asylums if they live beyond the age of four,” she said.
Meanwhile, staffed by1,000 workers, the Chernobyl plant continues operate a couple of kilometres inside the Ukraine border.
The authorities say it will close this year. The concrete sarcophagus built to contain contamination from the reactor has 200 holes and counting.
Orphans of the nuclear age
Kevin Barry, in Chernobyl, finds a land and its people scarred by a disaster from which they may never recover.
Chernobyl at this time of year is beautiful, the borderlands of the Ukraine and Belarus a pastoral and idyllic place. Vast swardes of rich woodland are full of babbling brooks and twittering songbirds, every way you turn, there’s a postcard vista to please even the most jaded eyes.
The locals, however, are edgy. The President of Belarus, Alaksandr Lukashenko — aka ‘Batska’ (‘The Father’) — has decreed that the farmlands here–abouts are now safe to plant and he’s threatening to fly overhead and make sure the workers are toiling.
If not, he says, there will be trouble. Big trouble.
The notion of Batska in an airplane is enough to prompt sleepless nights for those who remain in the Purple Zone, the area most contaminated by the accident in 1986 at Smelter No 4 of the nuclear plant that lies inside the Ukranian border.
In a tragedy of happenstance, because there was a stiff northerly gusting that day, Belarus took the brunt of the damage and because radioactivity is most lethal when it attacks developing human systems, children have borne most of the pain.
But for these children, the most serious ailment is not the thyroid cancer or the leukaemia or the heart trouble or the kidney failure or the various disorders of colon and spleen prompted by Chernobyl.
The greatest danger is the compassion-fatigue. 1986 seems a long time ago now and the incident at Smelter No 4 is no longer swaddled in the necessary event-glamour or crisis-chatter.
When the evening news is an atrocity exhibition, when daily there are hellish dispatches from Mozambique, Ethiopia and Chechnya, the Belarussians fall ever further back in the line.
The foreign correspondents have long since moved on elsewhere. The story of a child developing thyroid cancer over a period of years doesn’t conform neatly with the sound-byte culture.
By this stage, the Belarussians have had enough. A condition of mass denial exists in the country and a native of the village Solchechy in the Purple Zone says that up to around 1993, everybody fretted and freaked out but then they decided, well, to hell with it.
“The mess got to be too much,” she says.
We don’t think about it now. Life is life and we try to get on with it.
This is easier said than done in Belarus. The country’s economy is shot — agriculture was its mainstay and since Chernobyl, the income from farming has been negligible. Almost 30% of the country’s annual turnover goes to the clean-up operation.
Belarus remains the most Soviet of states. There are thickly-piled layers bureaucracy and this tangle of demented protocol regulations and petty restrictions is amorphic, constantly shape-shifting.
The natives have had to develop a stoic acceptance of a hard frustrating life…….. https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/views/analysis/kevin-barry-in-chernobyl-misha-is-an-example-of-what-happens-when-a-country-is-on-its-knees-941735.html
Belarus nuclear physicist warns on the unsafety of new nuclear plant
Nuclear physicist about Chernobyl / ENG subs
Professor Heorhi F. Lepin, a physicist, co-chairman of the public association ‘Scientists For A Nuclear-Free Belarus’, who took part in the rectification of the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster, warns the Belarusians against launching the nuclear power plant in Astravets. https://belsat.eu/en/?p=1108658
According to him, the site chosen is no good and even dangerous – once an earthquake happened on the spot; there is an intersection of crust fractures. However, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka called the scientists who are critical of nuclear-power engineering and particularly the Astravets NPP ‘undercover bandits’ and ‘enemies of the people’, Lepin stressed. The Belarusian NPP with two VVER-1200 reactors with a total capacity of 2,400 MW is being built according to the Russian project near Astravets in the Hrodna region. The first power unit is scheduled to be commissioned in 2019, the second one — in 2020. Subscribe to our channels:
Anxiety over’Belarus nuclear reactor starting up: Lithuania buys iodine tablets
Lithuania to purchase 4 mln iodine tablets to use in case of BelNPP accident, Belsat, 28 June 19 The Lithuanian Ministry of Health will spend about one million euros on 4 million iodine tablets to be used in case of an accident at the Belarusian NPP. This year they should be distributed to residents of the Belarusian-Lithuanian borderland and Vilnius, ru.delfi.lt reports.
Minister of Internal Affairs of Lithuania Eimutis Misiūnas assures that the state institutions are ready for a possible accident at the nuclear power plant in Astravets. But he is not hiding the fact that the agency lacks coordination….
According to him, in case of “the worst scenario”, when the wind blows from east to west, Lithuania will have to evacuate about 20 thousand people in the 30 km zone of the nuclear power plant. Misiūnas believes that this is unlikely, as such weather conditions happen on average 16 days per year.
The first power unit of BelNPP will start operating in autumn. https://belsat.eu/en/news/lithuania-to-purchase-4-mln-iodine-tablets-to-use-in-case-of-belnpp-accident/
Breathtaking series on Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe
(Foxtel Showcase 12 June 8.30 pm and 10.30 pm)
Chernobyl: horrifying, masterly television that sears on to your brain. This breathtaking series throws us right into the hellish chaos of the nuclear disaster – and its terrors are unflinching and unforgettable, Guardian, Rebecca Nicholson, 29 May 2019 After three of its five episodes aired, the miniseries Chernobyl found its way to the top of IMDB’s top 250 TV shows in history list. While the fan-voted chart might seem hyperbolic, given that the drama had only just crossed the halfway point, it is not undeserving of the honour. Chernobyl is masterful television, as stunning as it is gripping, and it is relentless in its awful tension, refusing to let go even for a second. That old ‘don’t spoil the ending’ joke about Titanic will inevitably be rebooted here, but it is confident enough to withstand any familiarity with the story.
Chernobyl’s “liquidators” suffered acute, and long-term health effects
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How Did Radiation Affect the ‘Liquidators’ of the Chernobyl Nuclear Meltdown? https://www.livescience.com/65563-chernobyl-radiation-effects-body.html These liquidators, who worked between 1987 and 1990, were exposed to high levels of radiation, on average around 120 millisievert (mSv), according to the World Health Organization. That’s over a thousand times more powerful than a typical chest X-ray, which delivers 0.1 mSv of radiation. And some of the very first responders were exposed to levels astronomically higher than that. So, what happens to the human body when exposed to such high levels of radiation? [5 Weird Things You Didn’t Know About Chernobyl] It’s like walking into a giant, powerful X-ray machine shooting radiation everywhere, said Dr. Lewis Nelson, chairman of emergency medicine at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. Except, in this case, most of the radiation consisted of an even more damaging type of radiation than X-rays, called gamma-rays. This radiation, as it passes through the body, is ionizing. This means that it removes electrons from atoms in the body’s molecules, breaking chemical bonds and damaging tissues. Very high levels of ionizing radiation cause “radiation sickness.” At Chernobyl, 134 liquidators quickly developed radiation sickness, and 28 of them died from it. These people were exposed to radiation levels as high as 8,000 to 16,000 mSv, or the equivalent of 80,000 to 160,000 chest X-rays, according to the World Health Organization. Radiation sickness mostly manifests in the gastrointestinal tract and the bone marrow, Nelson said. Those areas have rapidly dividing cells, which means that instead of being tightly coiled and a little more protected, the DNA is unraveled so that it can be copied. That makes it more susceptible to the radiation (this is also why radiation therapy works to target cancer cells, which also rapidly divide). Within a couple of hours of the exposure, people with radiation sickness develop symptoms such as diarrhea and vomiting, Nelson said. When cells cannot properly divide, the mucosa or tissue lining of the GI tract also break downs, releasing cells and the bacteria that live in the gut (including in the stool) into the bloodstream. This would make even a healthy person sick, Nelson said. But because the radiation is also stopping the bone marrow from producing infection-fighting white blood cells, the body can’t fight those infections. People who have radiation sickness therefore have a weakened immune systemand frequently die of blood poisoning, or sepsis, within a couple of days, he said. High levels of radiation can also cause burns and blisters on the skin, which show up minutes to a few hours after the exposure and look just like a sunburn, Nelson said. While the GI-tract symptoms and burns happen almost immediately to a couple of hours after exposure to the radiation, the bone marrow survives for a couple of days. This means there is a latency period, when the person might even seem to improve, before showing symptoms of sepsis. The people who survived radiation sickness from Chernobyl took years to recover, and many of them developed cataracts because the radiation damaged the eye lenses, according to the World Health Organization. Lower exposuresBut much of the health focus around Chernobyl survivors has focused on the long-term consequences of the radiation exposure in these areas. The main consequence, for them, is an elevated risk of cancer. “But remember, the cancer risk is something you see 10 years down the road, so you have to live for 10 more years in order to see [that],” Nelson said. So the cancer risk is generally more of a concern for those who survived Chernobyl but were exposed to lower levels of radiation. The data on this risk is murky, with very approximate numbers, but it is estimated that 270,000 people in the Ukraine, Russia and Belarus who wouldn’t have otherwise developed cancers did develop these illnesses. This mainly manifested as thyroid cancer, directly caused by radioactive particles of iodine-131 released by the explosion. The thyroid needs iodine in order to produce hormones that regulate our metabolism. But if it doesn’t have enough of the healthy, nonradioactive iodine found in many foods, it absorbs the radioactive iodine, and this can eventually lead to thyroid cancer. This is why in the HBO series “Chernobyl,” people take iodine pills; filling those stores of iodine in the thyroid prevents it from absorbing the radioactive iodine. These radioactive particles, which also include others such as cesium-137 enter the body through contact with the skin or through the mouth and nose. In Chernobyl, these particles were thrown into the air, carried by winds and later fell back down in surrounding areas, contaminated crops and water, and the people who ate them. |
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Lithuania wants Belarus to convert its Russian-built nuclear power plant to gas
Lithuania to ask Belarus to switch nuclear plant to gas VILNIUS (Reuters) 6 Mar 19, – Lithuanian prime minister Saulius Skvernelis will ask Belarus to convert its Russian-built nuclear power plant to gas provided by Lithuania’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal and a planned gas link between Lithuania and Poland.
The nearly-completed nuclear plant has long been viewed as a threat to its safety and national security by Lithuania, which says it is not built to the highest safety standards, an allegation which is denied by Belarus.
Astravets, which is near the border with Lithuania, is being built by Russia’s Atomstroyexport and financed with a $10 billion loan from by Moscow. It expects to have the first of its two 1.2 gigawatt VVER 1200 reactors online this year and the next one in 2020.
“It’s up to Belarus to make a choice: to keep on having an energy sector which depends on the policies of a single country, or to make a strategic change,” Skvernelis said on Monday, without naming Russia, the dominant supplier of energy to Belarus.
“Lithuania could be a good example and a useful partner for Belarus,” he added.,………
Reporting by Andrius Sytas; Editing by Alexander Smith https://www.reuters.com/article/us-baltics-energy/lithuania-to-ask-belarus-to-switch-nuclear-plant-to-gas-idUSKCN1QL163
If USA US deploys nuclear weapons in Europe RUSSIA and Belarus will consider a joint military response
‘Things will turn NASTY’ Belarus leader issues warning after collapse of nuclear treaty https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1090969/belarus-news-inf-treaty-world-war-3-russia-v-usa-nato
RUSSIA and Belarus will consider a joint military response if the US deploys weapons in Europe after pulling out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
But Donald Trump has pulled the US out of the accord after accusing Russia of committing repeated violations and Mr Lukashenko fears the security of Belarus could be compromised as a result.
He said: “It is a catastrophe, particularly for us.
“I am afraid the Americans will grab the fleeting opportunity and deploy the missiles in Europe after breaking the treaty. “If they do, things will turn nasty for us, too. Because together with Russia, we will have to think of reciprocal measures.”
He continued: “It would be unavoidable if this happened. It would be even worse if, God forbid, missiles were deployed in Ukraine.
“This is why I am wholeheartedly against dissolving the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
“We pursue a peace-loving policy. We don’t need scuffles between major powers, from which, judging from history, we’ve always suffered.
“This is why we don’t need this slaughter, this fight, particularly now around the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.”
Mr Lukashenko said he believes NATO is keen to deploy missiles in Europe.
He said: “It seems to me that although NATO claims they are not going to deploy these missiles in Europe, they are running a bluff.
“Otherwise, why would they withdraw? Why did they have to destroy this treaty?
“They should have come to terms with China and make it part of the treaty if China was the focus of it.”
TOR-M2 air defense missile systems to protect Belarus nuclear power plant
December 2018 Global Defense Security army news industryPOSTED, 08 DECEMBER 2018 A battery of Tor-M2 SAM (Surface-To-Air defense missile system) produced by Concern Almaz-Antey will enter in service with the 1146th Guards surface-to-air missile regiment deployed near a Belarusian nuclear power plant, which is under construction, Major General Igor Golub, the commander of the Air and Air Defense Forces of the Belarusian Armed Forces, said.
“Russia will supply another battery of Tor-M2 surface-to-air missile systems soon. They will come in service with the 1146th Guards surface-to-air missile regiment,” the commander quoted by the Belorusskaya Voennaya Gazeta military newspaper said.
Previous reports said that Concern Almaz-Antey had handed over a shipment of Tor-M2 surface-to-air missiles to the Belarusian Defense Ministry ahead of time. They had been assembled a month ahead of schedule. Belarus has received the fifth SAM shipment.
The 1146th surface-to-air regiment was revived in Belarus in 2017. The four-battery regiment is armed with Tor-M2 surface-to-air missiles. It protects the Belarusian airspace in the northwest covering the Belarusian nuclear power station.
The Tor-M2 is an upgraded version of the Tor-M1 short-range air defense missile system. The TOR-M2/M2E is designed by the Russian Defense Company Almaz-Antey. The TOR-M2 / M2E is designed to destroy aircraft, helicopters, aerodynamic UAVs, guided missiles and other components of high precision weapons flying at medium, low and extremely low altitudes in adverse air and jamming environment. The Tor-M2 missile system can be mounted on wheeled or tracked chassis.
The Tor-M2 can simultaneously engage up to 48 processed targets and ten tracked targets.The TOR-M2 can engage a target at the range from 1,000 to 12,000 m and to an altitude from 10 to 10,000 m.
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