Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant

Where it sits. The Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant stands on the shore of Lake Drūkšiai in Visaginas Municipality, in the far north-east of Lithuania, close to the Belarusian border and about 130 kilometres from Vilnius. The lake, the largest in Lithuania, supplied cooling water. The plant takes its name from the town of Ignalina some 40 kilometres away, but its own settlement is Visaginas, a town founded in 1975 in pine forest specifically to house the workforce, built to a modern Soviet plan and populated largely by Russian-speaking specialists brought in from across the Union. That relationship between plant and company town is central to understanding the place.

What was built here. Ignalina housed two RBMK-1500 reactors, an uprated version of the graphite-moderated, water-cooled design used at Chernobyl, and the most powerful reactors of that family ever operated. At full output the plant covered around 70 per cent of Lithuania's electricity demand and made a small country a net exporter of power. The RBMK design has no robust containment structure of the kind standard in Western reactors, and after 1986 that shortcoming was understood internationally as decisive. When Lithuania negotiated accession to the European Union, closure of the plant was made a condition of membership. Unit 1 shut down at the end of 2004, Unit 2 on 31 December 2009.

Decommissioning as a long project. Shutting a reactor is quick; dismantling one takes decades. Ignalina is now one of the largest nuclear decommissioning projects in Europe, funded substantially by the European Union, with work on fuel removal, waste storage and dismantling scheduled to continue into the late 2030s. Spent fuel has been moved into dry storage casks on site. For Visaginas the closure was an economic amputation, removing the town's reason to exist and a large share of its jobs at a stroke; the population has fallen steadily since, and the town remains one of the most distinctive urban environments in the Baltic states, a planned 1970s settlement in a forest with wide avenues and no historic core at all.

On screen. In 2018 the plant became a filming location for Chernobyl, the HBO and Sky miniseries directed by Johan Renck. Because Ignalina used reactors of the same family, its interiors were the closest surviving match to the real Chernobyl plant available anywhere: the block control room with its analogue panels and rows of switches, the turbine hall, the corridors and the reactor hall itself. The production filmed the control room sequences and other plant interiors here, and the accuracy of those spaces is a large part of why the series felt documentary rather than staged. Vilnius supplied the exteriors of Pripyat; Ignalina supplied the machine. The series never claims to have been filmed at Chernobyl itself, and the substitution is the reason it could show interiors at all: the Ukrainian plant's equivalent spaces are either destroyed or inaccessible.

Visiting. The plant runs an organised visitor programme, and it is not a casual walk-in. Tours enter the controlled zone and typically include the turbine hall, a block control panel and the reactor hall viewing area, with dosimetry, protective clothing and a strict route. Places must be booked well in advance, identity documents are checked against a submitted list, and children are generally not admitted. Photography rules are restrictive inside the controlled zone. A separate information centre covers the plant's history and the decommissioning programme with models and displays, and is more easily visited than the reactor buildings themselves.

What the visit is like. The scale is the first impression: turbine halls hundreds of metres long, corridors that run further than the eye follows, and control rooms whose instrumentation is entirely analogue, all dials, toggles and printed labels. The second impression is silence. A working power station is loud; a decommissioned one is not, and the absence of noise in machinery this large is genuinely disorienting. The site is not a museum in presentation and makes little concession to visitors, which is precisely its value. Guides are plant staff rather than tourism professionals, and the explanations run technical, covering reactor physics, the specific weaknesses of the RBMK design and the mechanics of dismantling a graphite core.

Getting there and the wider area. Visaginas is reachable by train from Vilnius in around two and a half hours, and by road in roughly two. Accommodation is limited and concentrated in the town. The surrounding region is lake country: Lake Drūkšiai is closed to swimming near the plant, but the Aukštaitija National Park to the west, Lithuania's oldest, established in 1974, covers a landscape of over a hundred lakes, pine forest and preserved wooden villages such as Stripeikiai with its beekeeping museum. Combining the two makes a coherent two-day route out of eastern Lithuania.