Official sources said Egypt has received offers from Russia and China for the tender of the Dabaa nuclear power plant, which the government is reviewing among other offers from the United States and Europe.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the sources said Russia offered to provide the enriched nuclear fuel and develop the Iron and Steel Factory and the Nasr Car Manufacturing Company that were built with Russian technology in the 1960s.
Yet Gamal Bayoumy, Secretary General of the EU-Egypt Association Agreement, warned of dealing with Russia or Eastern Europe in nuclear issues due to their poor technology, pointing to the Chernobyl disaster.
“We had a bad experience with five factories built by Romania in the sixties, including the phosphate factory in the Red Sea Governorate and the caustic soda factory in Alexandria, which only works at 30 percent capacity,” he said.
Over three consecutive decades, and under different governments, official promises had been made to achieve Egypt’s nuclear energy dream, the latest was by incumbent president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who pledged to revive the project that has been stalled for 32 years.
In 1981, former president Mohamed Hosni Mubarak decreed the allocation of lands at al-Dabaa region, 400 km west of Cairo, for the implementation of Egypt’s first electricity-generating nuclear station. In 1986, the tender for the reactor’s construction was halted after Russia’s Chernobyl reactor catastrophe.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
