YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am) — Senior US and Armenian officials discussed the Armenian government’s declared plans for a new nuclear plant on Friday, October 23, three weeks after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan signaled readiness to let Russia build it.
Pashinyan repeatedly said until this month that his government made a strategic decision to replace Armenia’s aging nuclear plant at Metsamor with a facility equipped with small modular reactors (SMRs), a new and relatively untested technology offered by the United States. He and US Vice President JD Vance finalized a US-Armenian agreement on nuclear energy cooperation when they met in Yerevan in February.
“American technology is going to be coming to this country,” Vance announced after the talks.
Two days after meeting with the head of the head of Russia’s Rosatom nuclear corporation, Alexei Likhachev, Pashinyan indicated on October 1 that he is no longer interested in SMRs and thinks Armenia needs a much more powerful reactor proposed by the Russians. He told Likhachev that Yerevan will decide “soon” which foreign country or company should implement its ambitious nuclear project.
The Rosatom chief spoke last week of a “signal that our proposal to construct a gigawatt-class VVER-1000 [power-generating] unit within the shortest possible timeframe has been received extremely positively” in Yerevan.
The issue was high on the agenda of US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Shawna Wilson’s talks with Armenia’s Deputy Minister of Infrastructures and Territorial Administration Narek Apitonyan.
