Fire officials say a damaged electrical cord caused a house fire that seriously injured a woman who was pulled to the sidewalk unconscious and covered in soot.
Olive Mountain, 60, was listed in serious condition after she was transferred to the Hennepin County, Minn., hospital with burns from the fire. Neighbors said she lives upstairs in a house that had been converted to apartments.
A statement from the Fire Department said investigators determined that a damaged electrical cord from a television set ignited a box of clothes. Fire officials said the smoke detector in the upstairs apartment did not work because it had no battery.
Neighbor Paul Bays spotted the fire shortly before 8 p.m., when he was taking his dog out.
Fire officials said the blaze caused about $31,000 in property damage to the building and its contents, and that it appeared to have started in the second-floor apartment, along a living room wall.
Mountain was the only one home at the time of the fire, officials said.
Hybrid Electric Ships leverage marine batteries, LNG engines, and clean propulsion to cut emissions in shipping. From ferries to cargo vessels, electrification and sustainability meet IMO regulations, Corvus Energy systems, and dockside fast charging.
Key Points
Hybrid electric ships use batteries with diesel or LNG engines to cut fuel and emissions and meet stricter IMO rules.
✅ LNG or diesel gensets recharge marine battery packs.
✅ Cuts CO2, NOx, and particulate emissions in port and at sea.
✅ Complies with IMO standards; enables quiet, efficient operations.
The river is running strong and currents are swirling as the 150-metre-long Seaspan Reliant slides gently into place against its steel loading ramp on the shores of B.C.'s silty Fraser River.
The crew hustles to tie up the ship, and then begins offloading dozens of transport trucks that have been brought over from Vancouver Island.
While it looks like many vessels working the B.C. coast, below decks, the ship is very different. The Reliant is a hybrid, partly powered by electricity, and joins BC Ferries' hybrid ships in the region, the seagoing equivalent of a Toyota Prius.
Down below decks, Sean Puchalski walks past a whirring internal combustion motor that can run on either diesel or natural gas. He opens the door to a gleaming white room full of electrical cables and equipment racks along the walls.
"As with many modes of transportation, we're seeing electrification, from electric planes to ferries," said Puchalski, who works with Corvus Energy, a Richmond, B.C. company that builds large battery systems for the marine industry.
In this case, the batteries are recharged by large engines burning natural gas.
"It's definitely the way of the future," said Puchalski.
The 10-year-old company's battery system is now in use on 200 vessels around the world. Business has spiked recently, driven by the need to reduce emissions, and by landmark projects such as battery-electric high-speed ferries taking shape in the U.S.
"When you're building a new vessel, you want it to last for, say, 30 years. You don't want to adopt a technology that's on the margins in terms of obsolescence," said Puchalski. "You want to build it to be future-proof."
Dirty ships
For years, the shipping industry has been criticized for being slow to clean up its act. Most ships use heavy fuel oil, a cheap, viscous form of petroleum that produces immense exhaust. According to the European Commission, shipping currently pumps out about 940 million tonnes of CO2 each year, nearly three per cent of the global total.
That share is expected to climb even higher as other sectors reduce emissions.
When it comes to electric ships, Scandinavia is leading the world. Several of the region's car and passenger ferries are completely battery powered — recharged at the dock by relatively clean hydro power, and projects such as Kootenay Lake's electric-ready ferry show similar progress in Canada.
Tougher regulations and retailer pressure
The push for cleaner alternatives is being partly driven by worldwide regulations, with international shipping regulators bringing in tougher emission standards after a decade of talk and study, while financing initiatives are helping B.C. electric ferries scale up.
At the same time, pressure is building from customers, such as Mountain Equipment Co-op, which closely tracks its environmental footprint. Kevin Lee, who heads MEC's supply chain, said large companies are realizing they are accountable for their contributions to climate change, from the factory to the retail floor.
"You're hearing more companies build it into their DNA in terms of how they do business, and that's cool to see," said Lee. "It's not just MEC anymore trying to do this, there's a lot more partners out there."
In the global race to cut emissions, all kinds of options are on the table for ships, including giant kites being tested to harvest wind power at sea, and ports piloting hydrogen-powered cranes to cut dockside emissions.
Modern versions of sailing ships are also being examined to haul cargo with minimal fuel consumption.
But in practical terms, hybrids and, in the future, pure electrics are likely to play a larger role in keeping the propellers turning along Canada's coast, with neighboring fleets like Washington State Ferries' upgrade underscoring the shift.
Maple Ridge Lithium-Ion Battery Plant will be a $1B E-One Moli clean-tech facility in Canada, manufacturing high-performance cells for tools and devices, with federal and provincial funding, creating 450 jobs and boosting battery supply chains.
Key Points
A $1B E-One Moli facility in B.C. producing lithium-ion cells, backed by federal and provincial funding.
✅ $204.5M federal and up to $80M B.C. support committed
✅ E-One Moli to create 450 skilled jobs in Maple Ridge
✅ High-performance cells for tools, medical devices, and equipment
A lithium-ion battery cell production plant costing more than $1 billion will be built in Maple Ridge, B.C., Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier David Eby jointly announced on Tuesday.
Trudeau and Eby say the new E-One Moli facility will bolster Canada's role as a global leader in clean technology, as recent investments in Quebec's EV battery assembly illustrate today.
It will be the largest factory in Canada to manufacture such high-performance batteries, Trudeau said during the announcement, amid other developments such as a new plant in the Niagara Region supporting EV growth.
The B.C. government will contribute up to $80 million, while the federal government plans to contribute up to $204.5 million to the project. E-One Moli and private sources will supply the rest of the funding.
Trudeau said B.C. has long been known for its innovation in the clean-technology sector, and securing the clean battery manufacturing project, alongside Northvolt's project near Montreal, will build on that expertise.
"The world is looking to Canada. When we support projects like E-One Moli's new facility in Maple Ridge, we bolster Canada's role as a global clean-tech leader, create good jobs and help keep our air clean," he said.
"This is the future we are building together, every single day. Climate policy is economic policy."
Nelson Chang, chairman of E-One Moli Energy, said the company has always been committed to innovation and creativity as creator of the world's first commercialized lithium-metal battery.
E-One Moli has been operating a plant in Maple Ridge since 1990. Its parent company, Taiwan Cement Corp., is based in Taiwan.
"We believe that human freedom is a chance for us to do good for others and appreciate life's fleeing nature, to leave a positive impact on the world," Chang said.
"We believe that [carbon dioxide] reduction is absolutely the key to success for all future businesses," he said.
The new plant will produce high-performance lithium-cell batteries found in numerous products, including vacuums, medical devices, and power and gardening tools, aligning with B.C.'s grid development and job plans already underway, and is expected to create 450 jobs, making E-One Moli the largest private-sector employer in Maple Ridge.
Eby said every industry needs to find ways to reduce their carbon footprint to ensure they have a prosperous future and every province should do the same, with resource plays like Alberta's lithium supporting the EV supply chain today.
It's the responsible thing to do given the record wildfires, extreme heat, and atmospheric rivers that caused catastrophic flooding in B.C., he said, with large-scale battery storage in southwestern Ontario helping grid reliability.
"We know that this is what we have to do. The people who suggest that we have to accept that as the future and stop taking action are simply wrong."
Trudeau, Eby and Chang toured the existing plant in Maple Ridge, east of Vancouver, before making the announcement.
The prime minister wove his way around several machines and apologized to technicians about the commotion his visit was creating.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation criticized the federal and B.C. governments for the announcement, saying in a statement the multimillion-dollar handout to the battery firm will cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars for each job.
Federation director Franco Terrazzano said the Trudeau government has recently given "buckets of cash" to corporations such as Volkswagen, Stellantis, the Ford Motor Company and Northvolt.
"Instead of raising taxes on ordinary Canadians and handing out corporate welfare, governments should be cutting red tape and taxes to grow the economy," said Terrazzano.
Construction is expected to start next June, as EV assembly deals put Canada in the race, and the company plans for the facility to be fully operational in 2028.
Rosatom-RAS Cooperation drives joint R&D in nuclear energy, nuclear medicine, fusion, particle accelerators, laser technologies, fuel cycle safety, radioactive waste management, and supercomputing, aligning strategic planning and standards to accelerate innovation across Russia's nuclear sector.
Key Points
A pact uniting Rosatom and RAS on nuclear R&D, fusion, and medicine to advance nuclear technologies across Russia.
✅ Joint R&D in fusion, accelerators, lasers, and new materials
✅ Focus on fuel cycle closure, safety, and waste management
✅ Shared strategic planning, standards, and expert evaluation
Russian state atomic energy corporation Rosatom and the Russian State Academy of Sciences are to cooperate on joint scientific, technical and innovative activities in areas including nuclear energy, nuclear medicine and other areas of the electricity sector under an agreement signed in Moscow on 7 February.
The cooperation agreement was signed by Rosatom Director General Alexei Likhachov and President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Sergeev during a joint meeting to mark Russian Science Day. Under its terms, the partners will cooperate in organising research and development activities aimed at providing technological advantages in various sectors of the domestic industry, as well as creating and developing interdisciplinary scientific and technological centres and organisations supporting energy sector training and innovation. They will also jointly develop strategic planning documents, improve the technical and scientific regulatory and legal framework, and carry out expert evaluations of scientific and technical projects and scientific consultations.
Rosatom said the main areas of cooperation in the agreement are: the development of laser technologies and particle accelerators; the creation of modern diagnostic equipment, nuclear medicine and radiation therapy; controlled thermonuclear fusion; nuclear energy of the future; new materials; the nuclear fuel cycle and its closure; safety of nuclear energy and power sector pandemic response preparedness; environmental aspects of radioactive waste management; modern supercomputers, databases, application packages, and import-substituting codes; and also X-ray astronomy and nuclear planetology.
Likhachov said joint activities between Rosatom and the Academy would strengthen the Russian nuclear industry's "leadership" in the world and allow the creation of new technologies that would shape the future image of the nuclear industry in Russia. "Within the framework of the Agreement, we intend to expand work on the entire spectrum of advanced scientific research. The most important direction of our cooperation will be the integration of fundamental, exploratory and applied scientific research, including in the interests of the development of the nuclear industry. We will work together to form the nuclear energy industry of the future, and enhance grid resilience, to create new materials, new radiation technologies,” he said.
Sergeyev noted the "rich history" of cooperation between the Academy of Sciences and the nuclear industry, including modern safety practices such as arc flash training that support operations. “All major projects in the field of military and peaceful nuclear energy were carried out jointly by scientists and specialists of our organisations, which largely ensured their timeliness and success," he said.
ITER Nuclear Fusion advances tokamak magnetic confinement, heating deuterium-tritium plasma with superconducting magnets, targeting net energy gain, tritium breeding, and steam-turbine power, while complementing laser inertial confinement milestones for grid-scale electricity and 2025 startup goals.
Key Points
ITER Nuclear Fusion is a tokamak project confining D-T plasma with magnets to achieve net energy gain and clean power.
✅ Tokamak magnetic confinement with high-temp superconducting coils
✅ Deuterium-tritium fuel cycle with on-site tritium breeding
✅ Targets net energy gain and grid-scale, low-carbon electricity
It sounds like the stuff of dreams: a virtually limitless source of energy that doesn’t produce greenhouse gases or radioactive waste. That’s the promise of nuclear fusion, often described as the holy grail of clean energy by proponents, which for decades has been nothing more than a fantasy due to insurmountable technical challenges. But things are heating up in what has turned into a race to create what amounts to an artificial sun here on Earth, one that can provide power for our kettles, cars and light bulbs.
Today’s nuclear power plants create electricity through nuclear fission, in which atoms are split, with next-gen nuclear power exploring smaller, cheaper, safer designs that remain distinct from fusion. Nuclear fusion however, involves combining atomic nuclei to release energy. It’s the same reaction that’s taking place at the Sun’s core. But overcoming the natural repulsion between atomic nuclei and maintaining the right conditions for fusion to occur isn’t straightforward. And doing so in a way that produces more energy than the reaction consumes has been beyond the grasp of the finest minds in physics for decades.
But perhaps not for much longer. Some major technical challenges have been overcome in the past few years and governments around the world have been pouring money into fusion power research as part of a broader green industrial revolution under way in several regions. There are also over 20 private ventures in the UK, US, Europe, China and Australia vying to be the first to make fusion energy production a reality.
“People are saying, ‘If it really is the ultimate solution, let’s find out whether it works or not,’” says Dr Tim Luce, head of science and operation at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), being built in southeast France. ITER is the biggest throw of the fusion dice yet.
Its $22bn (£15.9bn) build cost is being met by the governments of two-thirds of the world’s population, including the EU, the US, China and Russia, at a time when Europe is losing nuclear power and needs energy, and when it’s fired up in 2025 it’ll be the world’s largest fusion reactor. If it works, ITER will transform fusion power from being the stuff of dreams into a viable energy source.
Constructing a nuclear fusion reactor ITER will be a tokamak reactor – thought to be the best hope for fusion power. Inside a tokamak, a gas, often a hydrogen isotope called deuterium, is subjected to intense heat and pressure, forcing electrons out of the atoms. This creates a plasma – a superheated, ionised gas – that has to be contained by intense magnetic fields.
The containment is vital, as no material on Earth could withstand the intense heat (100,000,000°C and above) that the plasma has to reach so that fusion can begin. It’s close to 10 times the heat at the Sun’s core, and temperatures like that are needed in a tokamak because the gravitational pressure within the Sun can’t be recreated.
When atomic nuclei do start to fuse, vast amounts of energy are released. While the experimental reactors currently in operation release that energy as heat, in a fusion reactor power plant, the heat would be used to produce steam that would drive turbines to generate electricity, even as some envision nuclear beyond electricity for industrial heat and fuels.
Tokamaks aren’t the only fusion reactors being tried. Another type of reactor uses lasers to heat and compress a hydrogen fuel to initiate fusion. In August 2021, one such device at the National Ignition Facility, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, generated 1.35 megajoules of energy. This record-breaking figure brings fusion power a step closer to net energy gain, but most hopes are still pinned on tokamak reactors rather than lasers.
In June 2021, China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor maintained a plasma for 101 seconds at 120,000,000°C. Before that, the record was 20 seconds. Ultimately, a fusion reactor would need to sustain the plasma indefinitely – or at least for eight-hour ‘pulses’ during periods of peak electricity demand.
A real game-changer for tokamaks has been the magnets used to produce the magnetic field. “We know how to make magnets that generate a very high magnetic field from copper or other kinds of metal, but you would pay a fortune for the electricity. It wouldn’t be a net energy gain from the plant,” says Luce.
One route for nuclear fusion is to use atoms of deuterium and tritium, both isotopes of hydrogen. They fuse under incredible heat and pressure, and the resulting products release energy as heat
The solution is to use high-temperature, superconducting magnets made from superconducting wire, or ‘tape’, that has no electrical resistance. These magnets can create intense magnetic fields and don’t lose energy as heat.
“High temperature superconductivity has been known about for 35 years. But the manufacturing capability to make tape in the lengths that would be required to make a reasonable fusion coil has just recently been developed,” says Luce. One of ITER’s magnets, the central solenoid, will produce a field of 13 tesla – 280,000 times Earth’s magnetic field.
The inner walls of ITER’s vacuum vessel, where the fusion will occur, will be lined with beryllium, a metal that won’t contaminate the plasma much if they touch. At the bottom is the divertor that will keep the temperature inside the reactor under control.
“The heat load on the divertor can be as large as in a rocket nozzle,” says Luce. “Rocket nozzles work because you can get into orbit within minutes and in space it’s really cold.” In a fusion reactor, a divertor would need to withstand this heat indefinitely and at ITER they’ll be testing one made out of tungsten.
Meanwhile, in the US, the National Spherical Torus Experiment – Upgrade (NSTX-U) fusion reactor will be fired up in the autumn of 2022, while efforts in advanced fission such as a mini-reactor design are also progressing. One of its priorities will be to see whether lining the reactor with lithium helps to keep the plasma stable.
Choosing a fuel Instead of just using deuterium as the fusion fuel, ITER will use deuterium mixed with tritium, another hydrogen isotope. The deuterium-tritium blend offers the best chance of getting significantly more power out than is put in. Proponents of fusion power say one reason the technology is safe is that the fuel needs to be constantly fed into the reactor to keep fusion happening, making a runaway reaction impossible.
Deuterium can be extracted from seawater, so there’s a virtually limitless supply of it. But only 20kg of tritium are thought to exist worldwide, so fusion power plants will have to produce it (ITER will develop technology to ‘breed’ tritium). While some radioactive waste will be produced in a fusion plant, it’ll have a lifetime of around 100 years, rather than the thousands of years from fission.
At the time of writing in September, researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor in Oxfordshire were due to start their deuterium-tritium fusion reactions. “JET will help ITER prepare a choice of machine parameters to optimise the fusion power,” says Dr Joelle Mailloux, one of the scientific programme leaders at JET. These parameters will include finding the best combination of deuterium and tritium, and establishing how the current is increased in the magnets before fusion starts.
The groundwork laid down at JET should accelerate ITER’s efforts to accomplish net energy gain. ITER will produce ‘first plasma’ in December 2025 and be cranked up to full power over the following decade. Its plasma temperature will reach 150,000,000°C and its target is to produce 500 megawatts of fusion power for every 50 megawatts of input heating power.
“If ITER is successful, it’ll eliminate most, if not all, doubts about the science and liberate money for technology development,” says Luce. That technology development will be demonstration fusion power plants that actually produce electricity, where advanced reactors can build on decades of expertise. “ITER is opening the door and saying, yeah, this works – the science is there.”
Infrastructure Security Algorithm prioritizes cyber defense for power grids and critical infrastructure, mitigating ransomware, blackout risks, and cascading failures by guiding utilities, regulators, and cyber insurers on optimal security investment allocation.
Key Points
An algorithm that optimizes security spending to cut ransomware and blackout risks across critical infrastructure.
✅ Guides utilities on optimal security allocation
✅ Uses incentives to correct human risk biases
✅ Prioritizes assets to prevent cascading outages
Millions of people could suddenly lose electricity if a ransomware attack just slightly tweaked energy flow onto the U.S. power grid, as past US utility intrusions have shown.
No single power utility company has enough resources to protect the entire grid, but maybe all 3,000 of the grid's utilities could fill in the most crucial security gaps if there were a map showing where to prioritize their security investments.
Purdue University researchers have developed an algorithm to create that map. Using this tool, regulatory authorities or cyber insurance companies could establish a framework for protecting the U.S. power grid that guides the security investments of power utility companies to parts of the grid at greatest risk of causing a blackout if hacked.
Power grids are a type of critical infrastructure, which is any network - whether physical like water systems or virtual like health care record keeping - considered essential to a country's function and safety. The biggest ransomware attacks in history have happened in the past year, affecting most sectors of critical infrastructure in the U.S. such as grain distribution systems in the food and agriculture sector and the Colonial Pipeline, which carries fuel throughout the East Coast, prompting increased military preparation for grid hacks in the U.S.
With this trend in mind, Purdue researchers evaluated the algorithm in the context of various types of critical infrastructure in addition to the power sector, including electricity-sector IoT devices that interface with grid operations. The goal is that the algorithm would help secure any large and complex infrastructure system against cyberattacks.
"Multiple companies own different parts of infrastructure. When ransomware hits, it affects lots of different pieces of technology owned by different providers, so that's what makes ransomware a problem at the state, national and even global level," said Saurabh Bagchi, a professor in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue. "When you are investing security money on large-scale infrastructures, bad investment decisions can mean your power grid goes out, or your telecommunications network goes out for a few days."
Protecting infrastructure from hacks by improving security investment decisions
The researchers tested the algorithm in simulations of previously reported hacks to four infrastructure systems: a smart grid, industrial control system, e-commerce platform and web-based telecommunications network. They found that use of this algorithm results in the most optimal allocation of security investments for reducing the impact of a cyberattack.
The team's findings appear in a paper presented at this year's IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, the premier conference in the area of computer security. The team comprises Purdue professors Shreyas Sundaram and Timothy Cason and former PhD students Mustafa Abdallah and Daniel Woods.
"No one has an infinite security budget. You must decide how much to invest in each of your assets so that you gain a bump in the security of the overall system," Bagchi said.
The power grid, for example, is so interconnected that the security decisions of one power utility company can greatly impact the operations of other electrical plants. If the computers controlling one area's generators don't have adequate security protection, as seen when Russian hackers accessed control rooms at U.S. utilities, then a hack to those computers would disrupt energy flow to another area's generators, forcing them to shut down.
Since not all of the grid's utilities have the same security budget, it can be hard to ensure that critical points of entry to the grid's controls get the most investment in security protection.
The algorithm that Purdue researchers developed would incentivize each security decision maker to allocate security investments in a way that limits the cumulative damage a ransomware attack could cause. An attack on a single generator, for instance, would have less impact than an attack on the controls for a network of generators, which sophisticated grid-disruption malware can target at scale, rather than for the protection of a single generator.
Building an algorithm that considers the effects of human behavior
Bagchi's research shows how to increase cybersecurity in ways that address the interconnected nature of critical infrastructure but don't require an overhaul of the entire infrastructure system to be implemented.
As director of Purdue's Center for Resilient Infrastructures, Systems, and Processes, Bagchi has worked with the U.S. Department of Defense, Northrop Grumman Corp., Intel Corp., Adobe Inc., Google LLC and IBM Corp. on adopting solutions from his research. Bagchi's work has revealed the advantages of establishing an automatic response to attacks, and analyses like Symantec's Dragonfly report highlight energy-sector risks, leading to key innovations against ransomware threats, such as more effective ways to make decisions about backing up data.
There's a compelling reason why incentivizing good security decisions would work, Bagchi said. He and his team designed the algorithm based on findings from the field of behavioral economics, which studies how people make decisions with money.
"Before our work, not much computer security research had been done on how behaviors and biases affect the best defense mechanisms in a system. That's partly because humans are terrible at evaluating risk and an algorithm doesn't have any human biases," Bagchi said. "But for any system of reasonable complexity, decisions about security investments are almost always made with humans in the loop. For our algorithm, we explicitly consider the fact that different participants in an infrastructure system have different biases."
To develop the algorithm, Bagchi's team started by playing a game. They ran a series of experiments analyzing how groups of students chose to protect fake assets with fake investments. As in past studies in behavioral economics, they found that most study participants guessed poorly which assets were the most valuable and should be protected from security attacks. Most study participants also tended to spread out their investments instead of allocating them to one asset even when they were told which asset is the most vulnerable to an attack.
Using these findings, the researchers designed an algorithm that could work two ways: Either security decision makers pay a tax or fine when they make decisions that are less than optimal for the overall security of the system, or security decision makers receive a payment for investing in the most optimal manner.
"Right now, fines are levied as a reactive measure if there is a security incident. Fines or taxes don't have any relationship to the security investments or data of the different operators in critical infrastructure," Bagchi said.
In the researchers' simulations of real-world infrastructure systems, the algorithm successfully minimized the likelihood of losing assets to an attack that would decrease the overall security of the infrastructure system.
Bagchi's research group is working to make the algorithm more scalable and able to adapt to an attacker who may make multiple attempts to hack into a system. The researchers' work on the algorithm is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wabash Heartland Innovation Network and the Army Research Lab.
Cybersecurity is an area of focus through Purdue's Next Moves, a set of initiatives that works to address some of the greatest technology challenges facing the U.S. Purdue's cybersecurity experts offer insights and assistance to improve the protection of power plants, electrical grids and other critical infrastructure.
Latvia Astravets electricity imports weigh AST purchases from the Belarusian nuclear plant, impacting the Baltic grid, Lithuania market, energy security, and cross-border trading as Latvia seeks to mitigate supply risks and stabilize power flows.
Key Points
Proposed AST purchases of power from Belarus's Astravets plant to bolster Baltic grid supply via Lithuania.
✅ AST evaluates imports to mitigate supply risk
✅ Energy could enter Lithuania via existing trading route
✅ Debate centers on nuclear safety and Baltic grid impacts
Latvia’s electricity transmission system operator, AST, is looking at the possibility of purchasing electricity from the soon-to-be completed Belarusian nuclear power plant in Astravets, at a time when Ukraine's electricity exports have resumed in the region, long criticised by the Lithuanian government, Belsat TV has reported.
According to the Latvian media, the Latvian government is seeking to mitigate the risk of a possible drop in electricity supplies amid price spikes in Ireland highlighting dispatchable power concerns, given that energy trading between the Baltic states and third parties is currently carried out only through the Belarusian-Lithuanian border, including Latvian imports from Lithuania.
If AST starts importing electricity from the Belarusian plant to Latvia, in a pattern similar to Georgia's electricity imports during peak demand, the energy is expected to enter the Lithuanian market as well.
The Lithuanian government has repeatedly criticised the nuclear power over national security and environmental safety concerns, as well as a number of emergencies that took place during construction, particularly as Europe is losing nuclear power and confronting energy security challenges.
The first Astravets reactor, which is being built close to the Lithuanian border in the Hrodno region, is expected to be operational by the end of 2019, a year that saw Belgium's nuclear exports rise across Europe.
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