Egypt has announced a start date for construction of the first nuclear power plant

Next year in Egypt will start construction of the first nuclear power plant in the country. This was stated by Hassan Younis, the Minister of Electrification and Energy of Egypt, during an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. According to preliminary information the capacity of Egypt’s first nuclear power plant will be 1 to 1.2 thousand megawatts. So two years earlier the cost of a similar project was estimated at $1.5 to 2 billion U.S. dollars.

According to Yunis, currently the Egyptian side is preparing all necessary documentation for the international tender for the construction of the nuclear power plant. By the end of this year, all the papers will be handed over to the best companies in the field. Most likely the bidders will need about six months (since the announcement of the tender) to submit their bids. After this it will be necessary to determine the winner of the tender, which will take a special commission another six months.

Recall that the Egyptian nuclear program was frozen by the authorities in 1986 – after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The decision to resume it was made only in 2006. The Egyptian government announced that it was going to build several nuclear power plants in the country under IAEA supervision. As for building nuclear weapons, Egypt does not have them.

The year before last, Egypt and the Russian Federation signed a pact on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. According to it, Russian companies will be able to participate in tenders aimed at building the Egyptian nuclear power plant. Around the same time, the Egyptian authorities announced that a tender for the right to build the first nuclear power plant in Egypt would be announced before the end of 2008, but for some reason it never happened.