A lightning strike shut down Armenia’s only nuclear power plant, Interfax reported on Saturday, citing local authorities.
The station was disconnected from the grid at 9:55 p.m. on Friday, the report said, citing the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure.
The plant, located about 25 kilometers 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 go into safe shutdown mode,” the statement said.
The ministry said staff are working to restart the station.
Ministry of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure spokeswoman Sona Harutyunyan said that due to the lightning strike, the plant’s automatic safety systems switched the reactor into “safe shutdown mode.”
“The security systems are very sensitive and respond 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 modernisation carried out in recent years, including security systems, was effective and produced the expected results,” he added, in an apparent attempt to allay potential concerns about the security of the Soviet-era facility.
According to her, the nuclear power plant was shut down at around 22:00 local time. At the time, a storm was raging in Yerevan and its surroundings. The shutdown reportedly caused a brief power outage in some of these areas, as well as in parts of the Armenian capital.
The plant’s sole operating reactor, which produces about 40 percent of Armenia’s electricity, came online in 1980 and was originally scheduled to be decommissioned in 2017. The country’s previous government extended the operation of the 420-megawatt reactor by ten years, until 2026, despite Western concerns about its safety.
Earlier, Kursor wrote that Ukraine could buy Russian reactors for nuclear power plants from Bulgaria.
