nuclear-news

Armenia’s nuclear power plant the most dangerous in the world?

Aging nuclear technology, a disaffected work force in a facility located in a seismically active region – what could possibly go wrong?

Armenia’s Aging Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant Alarms Caucasian Neighbors International Business Times, By Dr. John C.K. Daly | October 6, 2011  The USSR might have imploded two decades ago, but debris from its headlong industrialization drive litter the post-Soviet landscape, and nothing more unsettles the population of the fifteen new nations carved out of the Soviet Union than its nuclear legacy.

The poster child for Caucasian nuclear concerns is Armenia’s aging Metsamor nuclear power plant, which provides nearly 40 percent of the country’s electricity.

The facility has not only alarmed neighboring Georgia, Turkey and Azerbaijan but begun to receive international notice as well – on 11 April National Geographic ran a story entitled “Is Armenia’s Nuclear Plant the World’s Most Dangerous?”…

Metsamor, which began operations in 1976, contains two VVER-400 V230 376 megawatt nuclear reactors generating about 2 million kilowatt hours of energy annually. Many environmentalists regard it as an accident waiting to happen. The Armenian government closed Metsamor’s Unit 1 in February 1989 and Unit 2 the next month following a massive December 1988 earthquake which killed more than 25,000, left much of northern Armenia in ruins and caused more than $4 billion in damage.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the facility itself is a hostage to the vicious politics disrupting the Caucasus…..

Metsamor was brought offline on 11 September and will resume operation on 27 October. The EU has classified the Metsamor’s reactors as the “oldest and least reliable” category of all the 66 Soviet reactors built in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Azerbaijani National Academy of Sciences President Mahmud Karimov recently voiced his country’s concerns over Metsamor, stating, “The European Union also expressed the need to close the plant. Despite regular inspections of the plant by international organizations, the results of these inspections are kept secret and no information is given to Azerbaijan about them. The countries of the region – Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia – have repeatedly proposed allowing the specialists of these countries to examine the Metsamor nuclear power plant. But the reports on Metsamor are not available to these three countries. The Armenian side says ten different committees have checked the Metsamor NPP in 2011. But the test results are not available to neighboring countries, that is, the inspections lack transparency.”

Quite aside from its aging technology, Metsamor, high in the mountains, lacks suitable water resources to use as reactor core coolant in the event that an earthquake damaged the facility, while Armenia’s parlous fiscal situation means that its government lacks financial resources to address the consequences of a possible accident. Metsamor is one less than a half dozen remaining nuclear reactors of its kind that were built without primary containment structures….

October 7, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | EUROPE, safety