Mostafa Eissa, head of the Egyptian Nuclear Energy Authority (ENEA)’s civil engineering department, announced on Tuesday that the government would begin building the country’s first nuclear power plant in 2013. The plant is expected to be fully operational by 2017, he added.
“Egypt has the means to become like other developed countries in the nuclear field,” Eissa said at a conference held at Alexandria University. “This will pave the way for the nuclear engineering departments at our universities to begin training the most promising cadres for this national program.”
Ibrahim el-Shahawy, vice-president of the ENEA’s projects department, for his part, said: “We had chosen 18 potential sites for nuclear plants, of which 13 were subsequently ruled out for technical reasons.”
El-Shahawy went on to explain that studies of the proposed site at Dabaa had been finalized, in terms of the project’s overall safety, its potential vulnerability to earthquakes and its possible impact on nearby residential areas.
Translated from the Arabic Edition.
