Armenia is discussing with the United States the possibility of building a new, U.S.-designed nuclear plant that would replace its aging facility at Metsamor, said Armen Grigoryan, Armenia’s Security Council Secretary, on Wednesday at a conference in Yerevan, reports Azatutyun.
“We have entered a very substantive phase. We are now discussing with the United States putting in place a legal framework. Without a legal framework, we can’t move forward,” said Grigoryan.
“I can say that the ball is now in the U.S. court. We expect that they will go through internal U.S. procedures before we begin our work,” he added without giving any details.
The Metsamor plant, operational since 1980, is responsible for generating roughly 40% of Armenia’s electricity output and is slated for decommissioning by 2036. Responding to this timeline, the Armenian government revealed plans in April 2022 to build a new nuclear plant by that time.
The U.S. has shown an interest in the ambitious project, with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan signing in May 2022 a memorandum of understanding on “strategic nuclear cooperation” between their countries. A senior U.S. State Department official said a year later that Washington is “assessing the feasibility” of building a nuclear plant equipped with small modular reactors (SMRs) in Armenia. She said the U.S. technology could make the South Caucasus nation less dependent on Russia for energy.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced afterwards that an Armenian government delegation will visit the U.S. soon to take a close look at local SMRs. He suggested that they could be more affordable for Armenia than the much more powerful nuclear facilities built by Russia.
In June 2023, Pashinyan set up a working group tasked with exploring various options for building the new facility, including the SMRs, and submitting its findings to the prime minister’s staff within two months. No such findings have been made public since then.
In May this year, Pashinyan’s government announced that it is negotiating with the U.S., Russia, and South Korea on the project. It did not elaborate.
The U.S. company NuScale Power Corp planned to build America’s first SMR plant in Idaho by 2030. It was due to consist of six reactors with a combined capacity of 462 megawatts. However, the company canceled the project last November, saying that it has not attracted enough utilities interested in buying electricity from the would-be plant.
NuScale revised the cost of the project from $5.3 billion to $9.3 billion in January 2023. The revised figure exceeds Armenia’s annual state budget.
