Posted on 10/06/2011 8:33:02 AM PDT by bananaman22
The USSR might have imploded two decades ago, but debris from its headlong industrialization drive litter the post-Soviet landscape, and nothing more unsettles the population of the fifteen new nations carved out of the Soviet Union than its nuclear legacy.
The poster child for Caucasian nuclear concerns is Armenia’s aging Metsamor nuclear power plant, which provides nearly 40 percent of the country’s electricity.
The facility has not only alarmed neighboring Georgia, Turkey and Azerbaijan but begun to receive international notice as well - on 11 April National Geographic ran a story entitled “Is Armenia’s Nuclear Plant the World’s Most Dangerous?”
Metsamor, 20 miles west of the capital Erevan and 10 miles from the Turkish border, encapsulates the dilemma facing many energy-poor nations heavily dependent on nuclear power – unlike Germany, they do not have the cash or alternatives needed to shutter such facilities and consequently, keep them running while crossing their fingers.
Metsamor, which began operations in 1976, contains two VVER-400 V230 376 megawatt nuclear reactors generating about 2 million kilowatt hours of energy annually. Many environmentalists regard it as an accident waiting to happen. The Armenian government closed Metsamor's Unit 1 in February 1989 and Unit 2 the next month following a massive December 1988 earthquake which killed more than 25,000, left much of northern Armenia in ruins and caused more than $4 billion in damage.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the facility itself is a hostage to the vicious politics disrupting the Caucasus. Armenia went to war with Azerbaijan in February 1988 over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. During the clash, which lasted until May 1994, Azerbaijan blockaded roads, rail lines and energy supplies, leading to severe energy shortages in Armenia. In 1991 pressure to restart Metsamor increased after a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan was blocked by a Turkish and Azeri fuel embargo. By the winter of 1994-95, residents of Yerevan often had only an hour or two of electricity daily, which the restart of Metsamor's Unit 2 in October 1995 increased to 10-12 hours per day and has been running ever since, environmentalists be damned.
Earlier this month however Metsamor was brought offline on 11 September and will resume operation on 27 October. The EU has classified the Metsamor’s reactors as the "oldest and least reliable" category of all the 66 Soviet reactors built in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Azerbaijani National Academy of Sciences Full article at: Armenia’s Aging Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant Alarms Caucasian Neighbors
ba-dum-bump! (sorry, it was just sitting there...)
Indeed it was.
Whites gettin' uppity.
yeah, this’ll be a fun thread.........
Those darned Causcasians! With them, its always about me, me, me!
which provides nearly 40 percent of the country’s electricity
To be honest, this plant is vital to Armenia.
All the green crap about that means nothing but a stone age for them.
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