RUSSIA TO LOOK FOR URANIUM IN ARMENIA
By Shakeh Avoyan
Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
April 23 2007
The Russian and Armenian governments agreed on Monday to jointly
develop Armenia’s untapped uranium reserves which they said could
make the country self-sufficient in production of nuclear energy.
A relevant agreement was signed in Yerevan by Prime Minister Serzh
Sarkisian and Sergey Kirienko, the visiting head of Russia’s Federal
Agency on Atomic Energy (Rosatom).
"The main purpose of the agreement is to look for radioactive materials
in Armenia and jointly develop those resources," said Environment
Minister Vartan Ayvazian.
According to Kirienko, the two sides will set up a joint venture that
will explore areas in the southeastern Syunik region which Armenian
and Russian geologists believe are rich in uranium. He was confident
that they will discover commercially viable reserves of the radioactive
metal used in nuclear power generation.
"Armenia will be able to meet its needs and sell [uranium] to others,"
the Rosatom chief told journalists "It is turning from an energy
resource dependent country to an energy resource exporting one."
A U.S. company, Global Gold, is already looking for uranium in another
region of Armenia.
The mountainous country was a major center of non-ferrous metallurgy
in the former Soviet Union and still exports copper and gold in large
quantities. But its uranium reserves, estimated at 30,000 metric tons
by Soviet geologists, have not been developed so far. Officials said
the real reserves may be twice bigger.
In Kirienko’s words, Armenia could become one of the few countries
of the world with a full uranium production cycle from extraction of
the metal to its transformation into nuclear fuel. Some of that fuel
would be supplied to the nuclear power station at Metsamor, he said.
The Armenian government plans to decommission the Metsamor plant by
2016 in accordance with its commitments to the European Union and the
United States. It announced plans last year to replace the Soviet-era
facility with a new plant meeting modern safety standards. The
government pushed through parliament a legal amendment allowing
it to look for foreign investors that would be willing to provide
an estimated $1 billion needed for its construction. Kirienko said
Moscow is ready to participate in the ambitious project.