Armenian Nuclear Power Plant Being Renovated

On September 15th Armenia's one operational nuclear power plant at Metsamor temporarily closed. The Armenian government denies that the nuclear power plant closed because of a terrorist threat, instead insisting that the closure is a regular safety procedure that occurs every four years. The plant will be closed until December 2012. Metsamor supplies more than 40% of electricity for Armenia. At the beginning of this year the Armenian Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources took over operations at Metsamor from Russian energy company Inter RAO. Metsamor is one of the few nuclear power plants in the world built without primary containment structures and that combined with its location in a region of powerful seismic activity have led the governments of neighboring Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia to express concern of over its continual operation. Metsamor is of the same generation of Soviet-made nuclear power plants as Chernobyl, where the world's worst nuclear disaster occurred in 1986.