ARMENIA WELCOMES OUTSIDE TEAM TO INSPECT NUCLEAR SAFETY

Xinhua General News Service
May 10, 2011 Tuesday 1:18 AM EST

Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan on Tuesday said that his
country would welcome a special Operational Safety Review Team acting
under the auspices of IAEA to inspect the country’s Metsamor Nuclear
Power Plant.

Sargsyan said that he had already asked the country’s energy minister
and other stakeholders to make a thorough review of the nuclear power
plant’s operational safety.

Armenia’s nuclear power plant at Metsamor resumed generation of
electricity after a routine five-day stoppage for cleaning last month.

Armenian energy ministry sources said that regular IAEA inspections
had revealed no violation in the safety and technical conditions of
the power plant.

The Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant was built and commissioned into
electricity generation in 1976 but was shut down after the 1988 Spitak
earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2.

The country had to re-commission the nuclear power plant after it
had run into an acute electricity shortage in the early 1990s.

The Metsamor plant now generates up to 40 percent of Armenia’s
electricity.

The South Caucasus country is planning to build two more nuclear
power plants.

Ashot Martirosian, chief of Armenia’s nuclear safety committee, said
that the authorities had planned to resort to stress test developed
by the European Nuclear Regulation Association to check the safety
of the nuclear power plant at Metsamor.

The stress test is targeted to assess the safety margins of the
Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant in the light of events in the magnitude
as that in Fukushima of Japan.