Armenia: Yerevan Tight-Lipped on Uranium Smuggling Case

Earlier this year, Georgia’s successful sting operation to uncover a weapons-grade uranium trafficking operation made headlines worldwide. Armenia has reportedly worked closely with Georgia in the ongoing investigation, but officials in Yerevan are reluctant to detail the country’s connection to the case.

What is known is that three people in custody in the uranium trafficking case are Armenian citizens. The provenance of the uranium they were carrying remains unknown, but one Armenian ministry has been quick to deny that it could be linked to Armenia’s 37-year-old nuclear power station, Metsamor.

Businessman Smbat Tonoian, 63, and physicist Hrant Ohanian, 59, are reportedly being tried now in Tbilisi for smuggling and attempting to sell 18 grams of 89.4-percent enriched uranium to Georgian undercover agents this past spring. Carrying the uranium in a lead-lined pack of cigarettes, the men allegedly traveled to the Georgian capital by train from Yerevan.

On November 8, the Armenian National Security Service (NSS) announced that Gagik Dadaian, an Armenian citizen with a prior record for uranium smuggling, had been detained in Armenia as the two men’s suspected supplier.

In a report distributed by the Agence France Presse news agency, Georgian Interior Ministry spokesperson Shota Utiashvili asserted that the source of the uranium that Tonoian and Ohanian were attempting to sell remains unknown.

For his prior arrest, in 2003, Dadaian was charged with stealing HEU from a nuclear fuel processing plant in the Russian city of Novosibirsk, according to a report published by the British newspaper The Guardian. Georgia and Russia have no diplomatic relations, thus Georgian law enforcement officials have been unable to check whether the Novosibirsk plant was the HEU’s original source.

Expressing concern about the incident, Slavik Sargsian, chairperson of the All-Armenian Association of Power Specialists, said the affair raises questions about security at Metsamor, which is expected to close within the next several years. Despite millions of dollars spent by the United States and European Union on upgrading the plant, the aging power station has long been dogged by fears about its safeguards.

“This issue must be totally explored because smuggling highly enriched uranium is not like drug smuggling. … This is a matter of security for the country,” Sargsian said. “This issue must be entirely disclosed not to stain the country’s reputation.”

Armenian scientists who have worked with uranium issues assert that the source in the Georgian trafficking case cannot lie in Armenia. “We have no enriched uranium in Armenia, and I think linking this story to Armenia is a provocation,” declared geochemist Sergei Grigorian, a member of the National Academy of Sciences who is running a geological survey of uranium resources in Armenia. Metsamor gets its enriched uranium from Russia, he continued.

“I don’t think one can get enriched uranium from the storehouse of the nuclear power station. That’s virtually impossible,” said Grigorian, who described the station’s storage facilities as “safe.”

Ministry for Energy and Natural Resources spokesperson Lusine Harutyunian similarly stressed that “[n]obody in the world could take out something from the station.”

Representatives of Metsamor did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Citing the Service’s ongoing investigation, NSS spokesperson Artsvin Baghramian declined to comment further on the case.