Armenia stops nuclear reactor construction

The state of building a new nuclear reactor in Armenia is still open, director of the Institute of Radiation Problems of the Azerbaijani National Academy of Sciences (ANAS), IAEA coordinator on nuclear sciences Adil Garibov told Trend today.

He said that the reason for the suspended reactor construction is that Armenia cannot find the necessary funds.

"The winner of the tender for the reactor construction was Russia," he said. "But it is necessary to pay at least several million dollars to Russia for the preparation of construction documents. Armenia does not have these funds and the world banks will not allocate credit without the documents," he said. For this reason, the impact of the new reactor to the environment was not assessed, he added.

Mr Garibov said that even if Armenia wants to build two units at the same time, the lack of a necessary cooling system in the country does not allow this. The matter rests with the fact that one of the major problems with the exploitation of the reactor is related to its cooling. Water resources of the Araz River are only sufficient to cool a reactor and its power may be 1000 megawatts.

Armenia plans to build a new nuclear power plant which will be more powerful than the Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant. It is assumed that the project will cost about $1 billion. The operating life of the existing nuclear power plant expired in 2010, but the IAEA experts agreed to continue its operation until 2016.


/Trend/