"At 11:00 pm (2100 GMT) everything went offline. It all went according to plan," Viktor Sevaldin, director of the 26-year-old plant, told AFP by telephone.

The plant, located in Visaginas in eastern Lithuania, provided 70 percent of the Baltic state's electricity. It gradually went offline from 8:00 pm (1800 GMT) Thursday, displaying its ever-decreasing power output on its website.

It is similar to the one that exploded at Chernobyl in then-Soviet Ukraine in 1986, the world's worst nuclear accident.

Lithuania, which won independence from the Soviet bloc in 1991, agreed to shut the plant by 2010 in order to win admission to the EU in May 2004. One of the two reactors closed in December 2004.

Vilnius later tried and failed to convince Brussels to let it keep the plant running until a replacement -- not expected before 2018-20 -- is ready.

Power prices in this country of 3.3 million people are to rise Friday by 30 percent for households and 20 percent for businesses, marking a new blow amid one of the world's deepest economic crises.

Lithuania's economy has shrunk by 15.2 percent this year, the government estimates, and the nuclear shutdown could shave up to one percentage point off gross domestic product in 2010, experts warn.

Vilnius has long had plans to plug the gap left by the nuclear plant.

"I can offer assurances that after the shutdown, Lithuania won't lack electricity," said Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius, who was elected in October 2008 and opposed last-ditch attempts to delay the shutdown.

Lithuania has turned to mothballed gas and oil-fired power stations. But the former will have to rely on supplies from Russia, whose relations with Lithuania are rocky.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.