To the European Union, Lithuania's Soviet-built nuclear power plant is a gigantic safety hazard that needs to finally shut down this New Year's Eve.

To Lithuanians, however, the twin concrete reactor blocks of the Ignalina plant, rising amid lakes and oak forests near the country's eastern border, have been a symbol of energy independence since the small Baltic country regained its freedom after the 1991 Soviet collapse.

That is why the EU-ordered shutdown of the plant's last working reactor _ considered too similar to the one that exploded at Chernobyl in 1986 _ is making Lithuanians uneasy. They now face the prospect of importing energy from Russia, considered an unreliable energy partner by many after its state-owned gas company shut off supplies through Ukraine last year and in 2006 over price disputes.

Lithuania will wake up Jan. 1 with 40 percent less generating capacity, a gap that has set off a race to build new, safer nuclear plants to supply electricity to the Baltics and Eastern Europe, a race Moscow is trying mightily to win.

On top of that, Lithuanians will pay more for electricity at a time when their economy is in a deep recession.

"We'll have to pay two or three times more for energy, and our competitiveness in European markets will be damaged," said Bronislovas Lubys, CEO of the Achema Group, a chemical consortium. The country's central bank says the loss of the plant will cost the economy an additional 1 percent a year.

In the eastern town of Visaginas, where the Ignalia plant is located, the mood is grim. Some 80 percent of of the town's residents are Russian speakers who moved there in the 1980s to build the hulking twin concrete reactor blocks.

"Lithuania's economy and energy industry are not prepared to live without a nuclear power plant," plant chief Viktor Shevaldin told The Associated Press. "Prices for consumers will increase starting in 2010, and this will undoubtedly affect the population's standard of living, industry and the economy as a whole."

The shutdown comes even as the EU seeks more energy independence from Russia, though it refused Lithuanian efforts to revisit the Ignalina shutdown.

The EU wanted the 1980s plant shut down as a condition of EU membership because the two RBMK-1500 model reactors are too similar to the RBMK-1000 version that exploded at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, casting a radioactive cloud over Europe. Ignalina's first reactor was shut down in 2004, while the second will be disconnected from the power grid an hour before midnight Dec. 31.