Lithuania Backs Free Zone Bill for Visaginas, a Town Built for a Nuclear Plant

FTZ News: Lithuania’s cabinet has backed a draft law that would create a free economic zone in Visaginas, a town built to house workers at the Ignalina nuclear plant. The plant stopped producing electricity when its two reactors closed, in 2004 and 2009. The bill now goes to parliament.

The Ministry of Economy and Innovation drafted the plan. It describes a zone of about 224 hectares next to the plant site. The ministry expects the zone could attract up to 20 companies, around 412 million euros in private investment and as many as 4,000 jobs. Those are projections, based on how the country’s existing zones have performed. No company has committed to the site.
Setting up the zone would cost the state about 21 million euros. Most of that would go to heating networks, roads and other basic infrastructure. Some of the land is forest. Parts of it were used earlier by the plant or by military units.

Lithuania has seven free economic zones, and Visaginas would be the eighth. The oldest, in Klaipėda, has operated since 2002. Its operators reported 643 million euros in cumulative investment by 2020, and close to 6,000 jobs in the zone that year. The Kaunas zone reported 1.56 billion euros in investment by mid-2024, most of it in manufacturing. Companies inside existing zones can qualify for tax breaks and other incentives.

Economy Minister Edvinas Grikšas told the cabinet the project matters beyond Visaginas. He pointed to the wider Utena region and to a national goal of directing at least 30 percent of new investment outside the largest cities by 2030. The town still has skilled workers and industrial space left over from the nuclear years.
Under the draft, the zone would run for 49 years, starting July 1, 2028, if parliament approves it.

The project has been delayed before. The Visaginas municipal council backed the idea in June 2024. That September, the ministry and the town signed an agreement aiming to have the zone running by the end of 2026. Grikšas later said that deadline was unlikely to be met.

Mayor Erlandas Galaguzas says foreign investors have already shown interest, although the zone does not exist yet. He said one firm looking at lithium battery recycling visited about a year ago.
Spent fuel from the reactors is held in an interim storage facility on the plant site, licensed to keep about 190 containers for 50 years. Deputy Economy Minister Karolis Žemaitis has said the stored material will not deter investors.

The bill still has to pass the Seimas. Under Lithuanian law, a free zone is created by statute. Only after that can the government invite international bids for a developer and set the zone’s rules./.