Egypt aims to set up four nuclear plants by 2025, with the first to start operating in 2019, Electricity Minister Hassan Younes was quoted as saying by the official Middle East News Agency (MENA) on Tuesday. Egypt plans several nuclear plants and signed last June a deal with Australia's WorleyParsons for nuclear power consultancy work.
"In 2019, the first nuclear plant in Egypt is expected to start working and will have been joined by three others by 2025" Younis told reporters on the sidelines of an international conference on nuclear energy hosted by France.
He added that the Egyptian drive was pushed by the increased needs for energy at lower prices.
However, Younis stressed that Egypt, at the same time, fully supported the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons initiatives. "We were the first who called for the Middle East region to be free from nuclear weapons," the official reiterated.
Nobuo Tanaka, head of the International Energy Agency, told the gathering that 17 new nuclear reactors were needed every year in addition to alternative energy projects, to meet growing global energy demand as the world's population climbs.
To make nuclear energy more attractive to buyers, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he wanted a change in international laws to allow nuclear producers to benefit from carbon credits that are currently denied to the industry.
"I propose that CO2 credits be used to finance all forms of decarbonised energy under the new global architecture after 2013," he stated.
But anti-nuclear bodies condemned the renewed push to develop nuclear energy, a cornerstone of Sarkozy's export drive.
"It is scandalous that France is continuing to promote nuclear energy," the activist group Sortir du NuclÈaire (Get out of Nuclear) said in an emailed statement.
