Secretary of the Security Council Armen Grigoryan announced that the construction of a new nuclear power plant (NPP) in collaboration with the US has "entered a concrete stage."
"We are discussing the legal contractual framework with the US, without which we cannot move forward. At the moment, I can say that the ball is in the US court. We are waiting for the internal procedures in the United States to be completed, and then we will start working," Grigoryan stated on July 3 on the website "Armenia-Eastern Partnership-EU: Challenges and Opportunities for Partnership."
During the discussion on the topic "Challenges and Opportunities for Partnership," Grigoryan emphasized that Armenia has made significant progress in diversifying its security sector, but there are still many issues in the economic sector: "There are many problems here, for the solution of which a lot of work is being done, and it is not by chance that the priority issues on the agenda of the April 5 meeting were economic ones."
Earlier, BMG reported that in June 2023, an interdepartmental working group was established in Armenia to oversee the construction of a new nuclear power unit. The operational life of the current Metsamor NPP has been extended until 2036. In recent years, technical modernization efforts have been underway at the plant to extend its operational life.
The operation and maintenance of the NPP are handled by the company "Rosatom." The nuclear fuel for the NPP is uranium, also imported from Russia. In Armenia, there is currently a discussion about the option of building a new NPP not based on Russian, but on Western modular technologies.
The Armenian NPP is the only nuclear power plant in the region, built during the Soviet era on the territory of Armenia near the city of Metsamor. It consists of two power units with VVER-440 reactors. The installed thermal capacity of one unit is 1375 MW, the electric capacity is 440 MW.
