2024-09-05 21:17:16
A lightning strike caused the shutdown of Armenia’s only nuclear power plant, the Interfax news agency reported on Saturday, citing local authorities.
The station was disconnected from the grid at 21:55 on Friday, the report said, citing the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure.
The plant, located about 25 km from the capital Yerevan, is under the control of the Armenian government.
“The cause was a lightning strike, which caused the station’s safety systems to switch to safe shutdown mode,” the report said.
The ministry said staff were working to restart the station.
The press secretary of the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure, Sona Harutyunyan, reported that due to lightning, the station’s automatic safety systems switched the reactor into “safe shutdown mode.”
“The security systems are very sensitive and react to any situation,” Harutyunyan wrote on Facebook shortly after midnight. “The staff is currently busy restarting the station.”
“This is further proof that the large-scale modernization carried out in recent years, including of security systems, was effective and produced the expected results,” she added, in an apparent attempt to allay possible concerns about the security of the Soviet-era facility.
The plant was shut down at around 10 p.m. local time, she said, while a thunderstorm was raging in Yerevan and its suburbs. The shutdown reportedly caused a brief power outage in some of those areas, as well as in parts of the Armenian capital.
The plant’s only operating reactor, which generates about 40 percent of Armenia’s electricity, was commissioned in 1980 and was originally scheduled to be decommissioned in 2017. The country’s former government extended the 420-megawatt reactor’s operation by a decade, until 2026, despite Western concerns about its safety.
Earlier, Kursor wrote that Ukraine could purchase Russian reactors for nuclear power plants from Bulgaria.