Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructures Gnel Sanosian said the company will look into foreign investors’ proposals on the design and cost of Metsamor’s new power-generating unit and recommend a final decision to the government within two years. It will also manage the planned plant, Sanosian told a cabinet meeting in Yerevan.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian already set up in June 2023 a working group tasked with exploring various options for the plant’s construction and submitting its findings to his staff within two months. No such conclusions have been made public since then.
Metsamor’s sole functioning reactor, which generates roughly 40 percent of Armenia’s electricity, went into service in 1980 and is due to be decommissioned in 2036. The government plans to replace it by a new reactor were first announced in April 2022.
Both Russia and the United States have shown an interest in the project requiring billions of dollars in investment. In May 2022, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan signed 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.
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 roughly matching that of Metsamor’s current reactor. However, NuScale cancelled the $9.3 billion project for economic reasons last November. The cost of the project exceeds Armenia’s annual state budget.
In May this year, Pashinian’s government said that it is negotiating with the U.S., Russia as well as South Korea on the matter. It gave no details of the talks.
In what appears to be a related development, senior executives of French nuclear reactor firm Framatome visited Armenia last week. They met with the secretary of the country’s Security Council, Armen Grigorian, who reportedly hailed France’s “interest in developing the Armenian atomic energy sector.”
The Framatome delegation accompanied by the French ambassador in Yerevan, Olivier Decottignies, also visited the Metsamor plant and held talks with its management. In a July 23 statement, the Metsamor administration said they discussed “the possibility of France’s involvement” in the new reactor’s construction. It said it “expressed readiness to cooperate with the French side on this important matter and look into proposals on reactor technologies.”