RUSSIA PLANS BID TO BUILD NUCLEAR PLANT IN ARMENIA

Reuters UK
Feb 6 2008

YEREVAN, Feb 6 (Reuters) – Russia said on Wednesday it will bid in
a tender to build a nuclear power station in Armenia to replace an
ageing Chernobyl-style plant that has provoked safety concerns.

Armenia, which imports most of its energy, has said it will close
down its Soviet-built Metzamor nuclear reactor, which supplies up 40
percent of the country’s power, only when it can add new generating
capacity. The government said last year it would hold a tender to
build a new 1,000 megawatt reactor at the site near Yerevan, which
could be ready by 2016.

"The Armenian government will hold a tender for a new atomic station,"
Sergei Kiriyenko, the general director of Russia’s Rosatom state
nuclear holding company, said on a visit to Yerevan.

"We will take part and we have good chances of winning," Kiriyenko
said, according to a statement from his press office.

The Metzamor plant, about 25 km (16 miles) outside Yerevan, was closed
in 1989 after a massive earthquake killed over 25,000 people in the
landlocked former Soviet republic.

Reactor Number Two was recommissioned in 1995, to relieve acute
energy shortages, while unit one remains out of action and there are
no plans to restart it.

Nuclear experts have expressed concern about the vulnerability of
the plant to future earthquakes.

The reactor at the plant is similar to those at Chernobyl in Ukraine,
where an explosion in 1986 spread radioactive contamination across
much of Europe.

(Reporting by Hasmik Lazarian, writing and reporting by Guy
Faulconbridge, editing by Anthony Barker)