YEREVAN, November 4 (RIA Novosti, Gamlet Matevosyan) - The Armenian government said Friday it had allowed the energy ministry to spend over $190,000 to build a new dry storage of spent nuclear fuel.
The contract for building the storage was signed by the Armenian Nuclear Power Plant and France's Cogema Logistics on September 30, 2005.
Plant director Gagik Markosyan said Cogema Logistics would share its technology with Armenia and consult the republic on the construction of the facility.
Markosyan said 24 new storage modules designed for 56 casks would be built. The first batch of spent fuel is scheduled to be loaded in September 2007.
Armenia's first dry storage facility was built by France's Framatom. It was commissioned in 2000 and currently stores about 600 spent nuclear fuel casks.
Armenia's nuclear power plant was opened in 1980 and shut down in March 1989 for political reasons, but was reopened in November 1995 during an acute energy crisis in the republic.
Outfitted with a Russian-made first-generation reactor, the plant's second unit generates up to 40% of Armenia's overall power output and can remain operational until 2016, experts estimate. Since 1993, the republic has received a total of $80 million to improve security at the plant.
Since September 2003, the plant has been run by an affiliate of Unified Energy Systems and Rosenergoatom, Russia's major electricity producers and its trust managers for a five-year period.
The EU has said the plant should be shut down temporarily and it would be willing to provide 100 million euros in funding. Armenian experts, however, said building alternative power facilities would require nearly a billion euros.
