Visaginas is the youngest city in Lithuania (initially it was called Sniečkus), located in a pine forest and on the shore of Lake Visaginas. It was built for the workers of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant. Specialists from all over the Soviet Union were employed to build the city and work at the station. The Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant was supposed to become the most powerful in the world. However, the termination of INPP’s work by 2009 was an indispensable condition for Lithuania to be able to join the European Union and NATO. Lithuanians made concessions, although many say that this was a mistake.
The city gradually became empty. At the moment, only 18,900 people live in the city. Only those people who take part in the process of INPP’s decommissioning work at the station. Now Visaginas has a very high unemployment rate, because those who worked at the station and lived in the city, are being forced to work not in their specialty.
This project is an attempt to look at the city from the other side. It is intended to show how the existence of Visaginas and Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant is connected. The whole book is a timeline by which the reader can get acquainted with the process of building the Ignalina NPP, study the statistics of its employees, and the inhabitants of Visaginas. Now it is difficult to say what will happen to Visaginas in the future since the decommissioning of Ignalina NPP may be delayed indefinitely. It’s safe to say one thing - the reason for building of the city was built – is no more. But chemicals will be there in a very long time.
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