The coastal city of Al-Dabaa, along the Mediterranean Sea, is 170 km west of Alexandria. It is part of the Marsa Matrouh governorate, stretching 60 km along the coastal line. The city gained strategic and political importance after a presidential decree was issued in 1981 stipulating that 15 km of the city and about three km deep into Al-Dabaa would be the site of the Egypt's nuclear power plant. But it was only this year that actual steps were taken to make the plan come true. After several delays since the 1980s, an agreement was finally signed between Cairo and Moscow on 19 November . The agreement commits the two countries to build a nuclear power station that will start operation in 2022, securing about 50 per cent of Egypt's energy needs, according to officials. The deal with the Russian nuclear firm Rosatom says it will finance and construct four third-generation reactors within the next 12 years, with a capacity of 1,200 megawatts (MW) each, for a total of 4,800 MW. The Al-Dabaa site is considered suitable for eight reactors. This Russian-built plant will be located on the same spot that was specified back in the 1980s. It will be built on approximately 12,000 feddans, according to the Egyptian Survey Authority of the Ministry of Irrigation and Water Resources. Calls for the establishment of a nuclear plant go back to the 1950s. However, for various reasons, including foreign political pressure and few energy shortages at the time, the plans were shelved until the 1980s. Several studies of the area, conducted over many years, show that it is more suitable than other suggested locations across Egypt, including the Red Sea, because it is less prone to earthquakes and has suitable meteorological conditions and ground water movement, as well as sea currents and tides. “Choosing the Russian company was only because it had the best offer. It had nothing to do with politics,” said Mohamed Al-Yamani, spokesman of the Ministry of Electricity and Energy. The third-generation reactors to be built in Al-Dabaa, Al-Yamani said, provide the highest level of safety and operate with normal pressurised water that prevents any radioactive leaks. The leaks that occurred in the Fukushima and Chernobyl reactors occurred in reactors that operated using boiling water. Details about the value of the Russian deal are not officially available . President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi has announced that a Russian company will finance the project, and that the loan will be paid over 35 years with revenues earned through the production of electricity generated by the nuclear power plant. The Al-Mal financial newspaper has reported that the power plant will cost some $25 billion. Locals whose land has been taken by the government for the site of the nuclear reactors have started to receive compensation. In November, residents of Al-Dabaa who were affected by the nuclear plan received LE120 million , the first installment in a total compensation expected to reach LE360 million. The government is compensating residents who used lands in the area for herding and cultivating olives and wheat, even though the lands were originally state-owned. The outstanding LE240 million will be given to inhabitants in two future phases. The second phase is expected in January 2016. The compensation was calculated at LE30,000 for each of the 12,000 feddans, a sum that was approved by Al-Sisi. He had promised “appropriate compensation” after leading negotiations with the population of Al-Dabaa a couple of years ago, when he was minister of defence. After intensive negotiations, Al-Sisi agreed to meet their demands. These included monetary compensation and job opportunities for residents. A Bedouin-style residential city with 1,500 housing units is currently being built on 2,300 feddans. The land was allocated by presidential decree by Al-Sisi in November 2014 for housing the people of Al-Dabaa. The residential area is scheduled to be ready by the beginning of 2016 and will include health-care units, markets, roads and sports courts. The services were not part of the original deal between the government and the locals: Al-Sisi has described it as a “gift to the people of Al-Dabaa .” Things were not always so rosy. In January 2012, residents of Al-Dabaa stormed the nuclear station site and tore down its walls and camped out on the land. They refused to give the land back to the Nuclear Power Plants Authority before reaching a settlement that compensated them for damages, and demanded that the government choose another location for the nuclear plant. In September 2013, they handed the site back to authorities after the settlement was reached. According to Ibrahim Al-Oseiri, former consultant to Egypt's Nuclear Power Plant Authority, finding an alternative location for the project would have been very costly and time consuming. “Studying and choosing another venue would take about four years,” he said. Al-Oseiri said that the cost of moving the project to another site would cost more than $25 billion , in addition to the funds already spent on Al-Dabaa. “We had already been losing about $8 billion annually over the past 30 years due to delays in implementation.” Besides, Al-Oseiri added, all the studies have shown that Al-Dabaa is the perfect location for the electricity-generating nuclear station, without having any harmful effects on touristic investments in the city. The investments were introduced to Al-Dabaa in 2004 by Ibrahim Kamel, an industrialist and high-ranking official in former president Hosni Mubarak's now-defunct National Democratic Party . At the time, the shift towards tourism development suggested that the state had changed its mind on nuclear energy. In 2006, however, Mubarak announced that the nuclear plant project would be revived and built in Al-Dabaa. The January Revolution in 2011 delayed the start of construction once again, but serious steps were made to re-launch the nuclear project under Al-Sisi's government. Egypt had planned to build a nuclear power plant in Al-Dabaa in 1984, but the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 made citizens in Egypt wary of supporting any nuclear project at that time. The government decided to put the project on hold, and it has been on and off since then, until last month's agreement with Rosatom. Al-Oseiri said that the nuclear power plant will save Egypt about $1 billion in energy spending per year, adding that Egypt's current total electricity generating capacity amounts to around 30,000 MW, and that Al-Dabaa is expected to provide an additional 15,000 MW to this capacity . Nuclear energy is part of the government's plan to diversify its energy sources to prevent any future crisis resulting from shortages in electricity, said Al-Yamani. Total electricity production currently rests at about 32,000 MW, and the highest consumption recorded was 28,000 MW last summer. The periodic nationwide blackouts in 2014, especially during the summer when air conditioners in homes are heavily used, proved that the growth rate of domestic demand cannot be covered in the long term by conventional electricity projects. Once an energy exporter, Egypt has turned into a net importer during the last two years because of declining oil and gas production and increasing consumption. It is trying to speed up production at recent discoveries to fill its energy gap as soon as possible. The discovery of the Zohr gas field in 2015 is expected to plug Egypt's acute energy shortages and save it billions of dollars in imports.The new find is the biggest in the Mediterranean with an estimated 30 trillion cubic feet of gas. Investments in solar and wind energy projects will rise significantly following the approval of the feed-in tariff scheme by the government in September 2015 , after lengthy studies determined a fixed tariff for energy produced from projects under the new system. The system allows any individual or company, public or private, to generate electricity from wind and solar energy and sell it to the national grid. New renewable energy projects worth $13.5 billion are expected to be set up by 2022, according to the Ministry of Electricity and Energy. Egypt aims to generate 20 per cent of its electricity through renewable resources by 2020, up from the current less than two per cent. “However,” stressed Al-Yamani, “nuclear energy is key to securing Egypt's long-term energy needs.”
