Armenia invites French nuclear threat to S Caucasus

Choosing the wrong partner is a fraught problem not only on a personal level. Starting a family with the wrong person or being deceived by a business partner is nothing compared to what can happen to the interests of entire countries when their leaders bet on the wrong partner. Armenia has long and confidently surpassed all its neighbors in this matter and continues to increase the gap.

It was recently reported that Armenia, in search of a replacement for Russia in its nuclear energy sector, has begun substantive consultations with the United States. It is hard to believe that the Americans will build nuclear power plants in Armenia. Americans never engage in such expensive adventures on the other side of the world unless it is of direct strategic interest to them. And Armenia, may Pashinyan forgive us, is not of strategic interest to Washington. Americans only form the environment and drive away outsiders with their presence.

Why is the construction of a new nuclear power plant in Armenia an adventure? Because the country does not have the necessary potential to implement such projects. The first nuclear power plant was built in Soviet times at the expense of the Union budget, and not at the expense of loans. And it's not just about finances, but also logistics. The problem is that the equipment for the construction of nuclear reactors is delivered by rail. As noted earlier in an interview with Day.Anton Khlopkov, Director of the Center for Energy and Safety (Moscow), said that one of the difficulties in the construction of nuclear power plants is the delivery of large-sized equipment. In some countries, such projects cannot be implemented only because there is no appropriate infrastructure to accept the equipment. Often the infrastructure is created specifically for the implementation of a nuclear power plant project. Taking into account the difficulties with communications that Armenia has, the construction of a nuclear power plant will undoubtedly require working out agreements with neighboring states on how the required equipment will be delivered, Khlopkov said.

Will America bother to provide logistics for the implementation of the Armenian project? Unlikely.

The United States is promoting its know-how - small modular reactors (MMR). However, such projects have not yet been implemented either in the United States or in other countries. The American company NuScale Power Corp planned to begin and complete construction in Idaho by 2030 of the first U.S. installation consisting of six small modular rectors. The total capacity of the plant was supposed to be 462 megawatts, which is approximately the same as the capacity of the current reactor in Metsamor. However, last November, NuScale abandoned the $9.3 billion project for economic reasons. It should be noted that this is slightly less than the volume of the state budget of Armenia for 2024.

So, Americans can be excluded from this formula for now. Negotiations with the Armenian side were most likely conducted not on the implementation of a specific project, but on what other options Yerevan has in order to abandon Rosatom's services. He is the main contractor dealing with the maintenance of the Armenian NPP. Nuclear fuel is also supplied to the station from Russia. In November 2022, Armenia signed a memorandum with Rosatom on the construction of a new power unit, but since then Yerevan has received moral support and promises from Western powers in exchange for abandoning projects with Russia. Until now, the country's nuclear power industry has been based on Russian technologies, which Armenia is presumptuously going to abandon, having neither the means, nor the personnel, nor the infrastructure for this. Yerevan has set a very difficult and expensive goal to reorient itself to Western nuclear technologies, although a small country with a small population could solve its energy issues in other ways - by abandoning nuclear energy and switching attention to other opportunities. Apparently, the neighbors themselves believed in their own stories that they had always been the scientific elite of the Union and they didn't care about anything. Well, well...

Yerevan started with the Americans, and will end, as always, with the French. France constantly picks up Armenia after it is "dropped" by someone else. The topic of the USA has somehow imperceptibly disappeared from the pages of the Armenian media, and now it is reported that France may build a new power unit of the Armenian nuclear power plant instead of Russia. This issue was discussed during the visit to the plant last week by the inadequate French Ambassador to Armenia Olivier Decotigny and representatives of the French company Framatom, which is one of the world's largest manufacturers of equipment for nuclear power plants.

As you know, France has 56 operating nuclear reactors and the 57th is now being launched. The EPR reactor (an improved version of the European pressurized water reactor), built in Flamanville, will be the most powerful in the world (1600 MW). The reactor, which has been under construction for 17 years, is now being phased in. The commissioning of the facility was delayed for 12 years due to many problems, and the cost of the project increased fourfold during this time to 13.2 billion euros.

If the reactor in Armenia is built at the same pace and with the same pile of problems, the country will face a multi-year energy crisis after the shutdown of the existing nuclear power plant. And timing is not the biggest problem. The main problems will arise when the reactor is put into operation. It would be useful for the Armenian side to ask how the French reactors built in Finland and China are doing.

In November last year, short-term short circuits occurred at the Finnish Olkiluoto-3 station during an emergency test, which led to a voltage drop. As a result, the nuclear power plant was automatically shut down. And this was the third emergency in a short time at the nuclear power plant built by the French company Areva (now Orano). In 2003, the Finnish authorities decided to build the third power unit of the NPP, which was launched back in the 80s. A French company was selected as the contractor, which submitted an attractive French development - EPR, which turned out to be incomplete, at the tender. The French did not tell the customers about this, hoping to finalize the project while the paperwork was going on. But it didn't work out. The reactor was launched only in 2021, and then with a sin in half, it reached its design capacity only in 2023. Over the years, the project documentation has been constantly revised, and the French themselves are so tired of it that they stopped tracking them. As a result, components, reactor components, and equipment often did not match and had to be returned to other countries for revision. As you can learn from the media, such a nuisance happened to the reactor vessel itself, which had to be returned... To Japan because he didn't fit the harness!

The EPR reactor built by the French also created many problems in China. As reported in July 2021, the increase in the concentration of rare gases was caused by damage to several uranium rods inside the reactor. It was not about a radiation leak, however, the problem was serious and the operation of the Taishan reactor No. 1 had to be suspended due to leaky fuel rods. The Framatome reactor was built by the company whose representatives recently came to Armenia for a viewing.

In France itself, things are not so good with nuclear reactors either. During the heat wave of the summer of 2022, many nuclear power plants had to be reduced in capacity due to the threat of an environmental disaster. The fact is that the water cooling the reactors is discharged into reservoirs, raising their temperature, which was already much higher than normal. The flora and fauna of the rivers of France, where the waters of nuclear reactors were discharged, was under threat. At that time, French environmentalists accused their country of not being in a hurry to meet the EU's green energy goals. Although, let's note, he shouts about it louder than many others. France is generally engaged in deception. Nuclear energy cannot be classified as a safe way to produce energy. It does not emit carbon into the atmosphere, but it carries many other threats.

As Kazakh power engineer Asset Nauryzbayev said a couple of years ago at discussions on the prospects of nuclear energy in Kazakhstan, "there is a myth about a waste-free cycle - there is no waste-free cycle, radioactive isotopes do not go anywhere, they have been stored for thousands of years, and they need to be guarded by armed people. Humanity has invented cheaper, faster and safer ways to generate electricity. Nuclear energy is a dead-end branch of the development of civilization associated with the nuclear bomb."

Maybe not everything is so gloomy, but the nuclear power plant is a constant source of threat. Like that gun hanging on the wall in the first act of the play-it will eventually go off. Unfortunately, on the scale of our small region, the nuclear power plant built by the French in Armenia will create problems not only for the Armenians themselves. Where are the guarantees that some fuel rods will not depressurize during operation or something else will not happen?

The only consolation is that the French atom for Armenia is a purely political, not an economic project. It is possible that it will not come to the implementation of the project. Because politics is a capricious lady.