By the time the children arrived at the emergency registration center in Kalvarija, Lithuania, they had already been decontaminated by teams in hazmat suits. Irena Dziuzaite was there at the gym, waiting with her Red Cross team.

On a dreary October morning in 2019, Dziuzaite, along with around 500 Lithuanian government employees and volunteers, was taking part in a simulation of the country’s response to a possible nuclear disaster in neighboring Belarus. Necessary preparations, given that the Russian state atomic agency Rosatom is building a twin reactor plant over the border, just 30 miles from Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital.

During the drills, the national broadcaster LRT aired radio and television warnings. At the same time, more than 800 sirens — some of which were installed during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania — wailed across the country. 

Helicopters from the nation’s Radiation Protection Agency buzzed the border with Belarus. The nuclear facility under construction in the Belarusian town of Astravets was visible on the horizon.

The controversy surrounding Unit 1 of the Belarusian Nuclear Power Plant (BelNPP) has steadily heightened ever since its concrete stacks began to rise above the tree line in 2012. Now, the first of the twin reactors are scheduled to come online in a matter of months.

Officials in Vilnius say that Belarus has tried to cover up several major accidents on the construction site and that the plant is a catastrophe waiting to happen. 

The $10 billion project is also a test case for Russia, which says that it is building dozens more plants in 12 countries, including Egypt, Bangladesh, Finland, Hungary and China. The Kremlin’s aim is for the nation to become the leading global provider of nuclear energy. However, Russia’s track record of accident cover-ups, dating all the way back to the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, has Lithuania on edge.