According to press reports in Lithuania, citing information on the government’s central procurement portal, the competition was announced on 28 March and proposals will be accepted until 30 June.
INPP, the company operating the station, will use the repository for waste generated by the decommissioning of Ignalina’s two Soviet-era RBMK units, which were shut down permanently in line with requirements for Lithuania’s membership of the EU.
Ignalina-1 was shut down in December 2004 and Ignalina-2 in December 2009.
Waste will be stored in the repository until decommissioning is finished in 2038. At that point it will be treated and disposed of, nuclear regulator Vatesi said.
The decommissioning is financed by an international donor fund managed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. As of 2018, the fund had received more than €750m, largely from the European Commission as well as Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.
The fund has already been used to build an interim spent fuel storage facility which started operating in October 2016.
The EBRD said recently that the decommissioning process is well advanced. The interim storage facility for spent fuel has received a total of 142 Constor RBMK 1500-M2 casks loaded with 12,891 spent fuel assemblies from the Ignalina reactors and storage ponds of Units 1 and 2.
A total of 190 casks are to be loaded and transferred to the interim spent fuel storage facility by the end of 2022.
