An Armenian nuclear power plant near the Turkish border may continue to operate past 2004, the year the government promised the European Union to close it, according to a news report.
A spokeswoman for the Armenian Energy Ministry said the deadline for decommissioning the Soviet-designed Metsamor plant - which produces 40 percent of the country's annual electrical output - is "no longer realistic," private radio station Radio Liberty reported.
Spokeswoman Zhasmena Ghevondian said her government no longer believes that it will be possible to find alternative energy sources within three years. Last week, Armenian authorities made sure that a reference to the target date of 2004 was removed from a clause on Metsamor in a statement adopted by an Armenian-European Union joint parliamentary committee.
Located 40 kilometers west of Yerevan near Turkey's border, Metsamor was shut down for safety reasons shortly after the country's devastating 1988 earthquake but was reactivated seven years later to end crippling power shortages.
Metsamor is the only nuclear facility in the world to go back online after so long a period of disuse. The decision to reactivate Metsamor was taken over the objections of leading Western nations and Turkey, which cited serious safety concerns.
Unable to prevent its reactivation, the EU and theUnited States have since spent large sums on strengthening the
plant's safety standards.
In return for the aid, Armenia promised to close it by the end of 2004. The EU ranks Metsamor among those potentially dangerous Soviet-built nuclear stations -including Ukraine's Chernobyl - whose reactors must be shut down as soon as possible.
But the Armenian government is apparently trying to postpone its shutdown indefinitely by setting additional conditions, which lawmakers voiced last week at a meeting with their EU counterparts.
After the two-day session, Hovannes Hovannisian, the chairman of the Armenian parliament's foreign-affairs committee, told reporters: "We are not obliged to do so, but we hope and desire to close the nuclear station, provided that we have alternative and corresponding sources of energy that would be unaffected by further blockades of Armenia [by neighboring
states]."
The bilateral statement adopted by the Armenian and EU parliamentarianscalls for Metsamor's eventual closure, but mentions no specific date - a fact underlined by Hovannisian and other Armenians.
Authorities in Yerevan now say they expect an EU commitment to assist in
the planned construction of a strategic gas pipeline linking Armenia to neighboring Iran and to seek the lifting of Turkish and Azerbaijani blockades resulting from the unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
The European Commission, the EU's main executive body, has already expressed support for the Iran-Armenia pipeline by agreeing to include it in its far-reaching INOGATE project.The pipeline would significantly reduce Armenia's dependence on Russian natural gas.
But getting Turkey and Azerbaijan to reopen their borders with Armenia before a solution is found to the intractable Karabakh conflict would be a far more difficult, if not impossible task, for the EU.
Well aware of that, Yerevan is apparently looking for pretextsto justify its reluctance to stop producing nuclear energy.Armenia's Energy ministry spokeswoman says the EU seems to agree" with the change in Armenian position on Metsamor's future. But there has not yet been any official reaction from Brussels.
Still, comments by a senior member of the European Parliament, Ursula Schleicher, may have encouraged the Armenian government. She said in Yerevan that a majority of the EU parliament believes that if the Metsamor facility is closed, its energy output must be replaced elsewhere. That, she concluded, is "why a plan of action must show how the energy problem is
going to be addressed." –(Albawaba-MEBG)
© 2000 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
