The US Has No Operational SMR

In a discussion about Armenia’s nuclear choices, Arthur G. Martirosyan delivers a plain fact that upends the government’s messaging. The United States does not have a single operational small modular reactor. The only countries that actually operate SMRs, he says, are Russia and China. He then asks the obvious question: are the Americans going to come and experiment in Armenia first?

The point matters because Pashinyan had spent roughly a year signaling that Armenia’s next nuclear power plant would be a Western SMR, before an apparent shift toward a 1,000 MW Rosatom reactor. Martirosyan’s argument is about leverage, not ideology. He explicitly says he is not against the technology itself; he is against Armenia being the first place it is tried, and against bluffing an alternative you do not possess. If Russia knows the alternative is not real, a negotiator will push you into the corner and you end up paying a higher price for what they were offering anyway.

This clip works as a short, self-contained myth-buster. It arms the viewer with a specific, checkable claim and a clear stake: Armenia has tied much of its planned development, including power-hungry data centers, to energy supply, yet it entered negotiations with Moscow waving an option that, by Martirosyan’s account, does not yet exist. For an audience watching Armenia’s dependence on Russia play out across railways and reactors, the line crystallizes why credible alternatives, not slogans, decide who wins at the table.