Environmentalists want the closure of Armenia’s only nuclear power station because of a risk of volcanic activity in the area.
The plant generates over a third of a country’s energy needs, but the Soviet Union shut it down after an earthquake in 1988.
Armenia re-started the plant in 1995 and has met all international atomic regulations since then.
Al Jazeera’s Robin Forestier-Walker reports from Metsamor.
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In This Story: Soviet Union
The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a federal socialist state in Northern Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. Nominally a union of multiple national Soviet republics, it was a one-party state (until 1990) governed by the Communist Party, with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian SFSR.
The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 when the Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government that had earlier replaced the monarchy of the Russian Empire.
On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the remaining twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states. The Russian Federation (formerly the Russian SFSR) assumed the Soviet Union’s rights and obligations and is recognized as its continued legal personality.
