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Comment by rmind | Hacker News Reader

A few points:

- The RBMK-1500 in the now decommissioned Ignalina Power Plant wasn't built near a big city, unlike the Belarusian power plant.

- Lithuania invested a lot into the safety of the Ignalina Power Plant, installing the latest European safety systems. Partly thanks to EU, yes, but the point is that there was cooperation and safety improvements. Belarus largely ignored the safaty concerns and recommendations by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

- Lithuania didn't invest into natural gas -- this is just factually not true. Elektrenai Power Plant was modernized (well, in fact, they just built a modern one in the same site and closed down the old units) as a strategic "backup" power plant, but the overall capacity was not expanded. If anything, Lithuania has been investing significantly into renewable energy, although perhaps not as much as we would wish.

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> - The RBMK-1500 in the now decommissioned Ignalina Power Plant wasn't built near a big city, unlike the Belarusian power plant.

Well, it was around 120 km from Vilnius, the new NPP is 60 km from Vilnius which is still sufficient. Leningrad NPP is around 70 km from St. Petersburg.

> Lithuania invested a lot into the safety of the Ignalina Power Plant, installing the latest European safety systems. Partly thanks to EU, yes, but the point is that there was cooperation and safety improvements.

It's still an RBMK and therefore far less safe than any VVER-type reactor.

> Belarus largely ignored the safaty concerns and recommendations by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The IAEA was on site and inspected the plant:

> https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-delivers-inir-miss...

There is currently also a EU nuclear expert group at the site:

> https://twitter.com/RosatomGlobal/status/1361996208928153604

- Lithuania didn't invest into natural gas -- this is just factually not true.

Quoting: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2020/04/28/eu-nuclear...

"For Lithuania, which invested a lot of money in a liquefied natural gas floating storage and regasification unit in Klaipeda a few years ago, the Belarussian nuke plant means it is a potentially cheaper, and definitely cleaner, readily available source of power generation for neighboring nations. In theory, that takes Lithuania out of the market. It’s the reason they are working overtime to get countries not to buy energy generated from it."

Wikipedia source on the LNG terminal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaip%C4%97da_LNG_FSRU

You were talking about investing into gas in the context of "zero-emission electricity". Are you seriously drawing equality to gas power plants and an LNG terminal?

The purpose of the Lithuanian LNG terminal was diversification of the gas supplies, thus minimizing the dependence on the Russian gas. It was a very successful project, cutting the gas price significantly and forming an effective gas market i.e. allowing the country to buy gas for the global market price (whoever sells for cheapest). Lithuania did not build new gas power plants, though. Quite the opposite, the strategy in the last decade has been to increase the electricity supply from the renewable energy which resulted in building wind and solar plants.

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