The Armenian Nuclear Power Plant provides 42 percent of Armenia's electricity. Argonne is teaching engineers to use Western safety standards for safe and dependable plant operation.

U.S. experts and Armenian engineers inspected the plant to identify weaknesses. This diesel generator, which provides vital power to the plant in case an earthquake interferes with the plant’s operation, was found to be safe.

Inspectors performed seismic safety inspections. Above, they check newly installed earthquake-resistant supports underneath an emergency confinement cooling tank. At right, the pipe near the ceiling, which leads from the spent-fuel cooling pump, was identified as unsafe.

Reactor safety program provides Armenia with a safe and reliable source of electricity

Argonne experts in nuclear reactor technology are helping make reactors designed and built under the Soviet Union safer and more reliable. Since 2001, Argonne has been helping managers, operators and technicians at the Armenian Nuclear Power Plant learn how to conduct safety analyses for their plant.

The Armenian plant has Soviet-style pressurized-water reactors. They are roughly similar to the pressurized-water reactors that make up the majority of commercial nuclear power plants in the United States and the rest of the world. But they lack many of the safety features that are standard in the West, such as containment vessels to prevent radioactive materials from leaking into the environment during major accidents.

The Armenian plant is similar to Bulgarian plants that were shut down in 2002 because they were not fully up to Western safety standards. But the continued safe operation of the Armenian plant is crucial to the economic and political stability of that nation and its surrounding region, said nuclear engineer Mark Petri.

“The plant accounts for 42 percent of Armenia’s electrical production,” Petri said. “The nation has few other options for electricity. For a time in the 1990s, Armenia had no electricity. People cut down trees in the parks for fuel, and many froze to death.”

The plant is 2.5 miles (4 km) from the village of Medzamor and employs most of the village’s 1,200 inhabitants. An accident that shut down the plant permanently could disable the local and national economy, as well as undermine the viability of the nuclear energy industry in the United States and abroad.

Argonne participates as part of a U.S. State Department program that also involves the U.S. Department of Energy, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the International Atomic Energy Agency and several other national and international organizations. This State Department program has made hundreds of improvements in the safety and security of Soviet-designed reactors since it started in the 1990s.

The improvements take the form of hardware improvements and upgrades, improved operations and security, more accurate methods of tracking and accounting for nuclear materials, Western-style training for plant employees, and rigorously scientific assessments of plant safety. “Argonne’s contribution,” Petri said, “is to help Armenia build the internal capability to do its own safety analyses, identify problems and fix them. We provide education, mentoring and guidance.”

Argonne manages the program that teaches plant workers to use RELAP-5, an industry-standard computer code that models the behavior of coolant throughout the plant’s systems and predicts how it would behave during various accidents. “It’s basic code for understanding plant behavior,” Petri said, “and demonstrates to regulatory agencies that the plant meets its design specifications.”

The RELAP-5 training program started in 2001 with formal classroom training. Since then, plant personnel have begun to work on their own with daily access to Western experts, as required. Over two years, the Armenian workers have participated in workshops that assess their progress, provide mentoring, give further instruction and help make them independent.

“The Armenian project showcases an earlier success story,” Petri said. “Most of the experts we provide for Armenia now come from Slovakia, where they became recognized experts through a similar program.”

Argonne also trains Armenian workers in how to properly inspect the plant and improve its safety against earthquakes. The plant is located in a seismically active area, and its two reactors were shut down for several years after a 1988 earthquake. One unit restarted in 1995, but the other remains down because it was cannibalized to improve the restarted unit.

In addition, Argonne has taken the lead in setting up an International Nuclear Safety Center in Armenia, as it has in many other nations. Called ARMATOM, the Armenian center will communicate and share safety information with other centers by computer and telecommunications.

Argonne is helping ARMATOM establish a Web site to share plant data and operating experience. The Web site will allow International Nuclear Safety Centers around the world to establish a central database by collecting and sharing informati.on about small accidents that occur at various plants around the world.

For more information, please contact David Baurac.

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