LITHUANIA LETTER/ Daniel McLaughlin: Back in April 1986, things were humming along smoothly in the forests of Lithuania, close to its remote border with fellow Soviet republics Latvia and Belarus.
The Ignalina nuclear power station was pumping electricity around the Baltic region, a second reactor was about to go on-line, a third was more than half-built and a fourth was already planned.
Residents of the nearby town of Visaginas were proud of a reactor reputed to be the most powerful in the world.
Then news crept slowly northwards of a problem at a Ukrainian power station that was the near twin of Ignalina. The people of Visaginas didn't know it, but the meltdown at Chernobyl had just changed their lives forever.
The world's worst nuclear accident gave huge impetus to green parties and conservation groups across Europe, and Mr Mikhail Gorbachev placed unprecedented emphasis on environmental issues in the Soviet Union.
Within three years of the world's worst nuclear accident, work on the third Ignalina reactor had been frozen and plans for a fourth block torn up. Activists called it a ticking timebomb capable of scattering deadly fallout across a vast swathe of the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, and well beyond.
But, 18 years later, life in the shadow of the "next Chernobyl" goes on. Huge electricity pylons still march away from Ignalina through the snowy forests, little shuttle buses ferry workers to the plant from Visaginas, and a digital display in the middle of the town still tells people the time, temperature and radiation level.
It is -20C, but the people walking among the town's squat Soviet blocks seem happy to stop and discuss their continuing fight to save Ignalina, not from a vanguard of green activists this time but a death sentence signed by the European Union.
"Europe doesn't need our power station, but we need it and Lithuania needs it," said Mr Stanislav Kreminski, who spent 15 years maintaining housing in Visaginas, built in 1975 for the people who built and later worked at Ignalina. The first reactor fired up in 1983, the second four years later.
"Things are fine here. People feel safe and the workers are good. It's a reliable station and I wish we had four reactors."
Mr Kreminski's views are echoed throughout Visaginas, home to 34,000 people whose livelihoods depend on Ignalina.
But they have little hope of a reprieve from an EU-backed programme to close the first reactor by the end of this year, and the second by 2010. Environmentalists say it is only a matter of time before minor incidents at Ignalina - including several that have prompted the reactors to shut down automatically - are followed by something far more serious. The design of the reactors is fundamentally flawed, they insist, having no containment shell to limit the effect of a meltdown.
Lithuania kicked hard against EU urgings to close Ignalina, which provides 80 per cent of the country's electricity and exports power to neighbouring countries.
Brussels has promised to help fund an upgrade for several gas-fired power stations to cover for the loss of nuclear energy, but that would leave Lithuania almost fully dependent on gas supplies from Russia's state-controlled behemoth Gazprom, a move that send shivers through a nation that fought fiercely to escape Moscow's rule in 1991.
The Kremlin still casts a long shadow over Lithuania and dominates its energy sector. Ignalina is designed to take only Russian nuclear fuel; the country's biggest oil complex takes Russian crude and is run by Yukos, a Russian firm in danger of being dismantled or seized by the state after a legal onslaught against owners and officials.
Lithuania's suspicion of Russian intentions is well-founded. Moscow regularly uses energy provision as a political tool to pressure former Soviet states such as Georgia and Ukraine. In Poland, Gazprom secretly routed a high-capacity fibre-optic cable through a pipeline it built across the country; angry Polish peasants cut the wire.
Most politicians want Lithuania to be part of a "power bridge" linking the Baltic nations' electricity grids, or, more ambitiously, to plug into gas supplies from the west via a pipeline running through Poland.
The people of Visaginas dismiss EU promises of decades of work decommissioning Ignalina; they have already pinned their hopes on mooted plans for a new, western-style nuclear reactor. Feasibility studies are underway, and President Rolandas Paksas says existing infrastructure and expertise at Ignalina would reduce potential building costs by 30 per cent. The plant would also ease Russia's hand off the Lithuanian light switch.
"We want the new block they're talking about," said a Visaginas resident called Leonora. "If Ignalina just closes, then we'll all be down and out."