DUBAI: The UAE's state nuclear company is moving ahead with plans to build its first nuclear power plant, saying it has filed a construction license application covering the project's first two reactors. The Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation announced the filing of the roughly 9,000-page regulatory application Monday - a year after it awarded a South Korean consortium led by Korea Electric Power Corp. the $20 billion contract for the project. The application to the UAE's Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation is based largely on previous work done for reactors in South Korea that will serve as a reference for the Emirati plants. ENEC says that should ensure that its plants are "essentially the same" as the Korean reactors, which have been granted licenses by regulators in that country. "We believe this license application demonstrates that the technology for our proposed power plant is safe, that the plant can be built to the highest possible standards, and that the proposed site is appropriate for the power plant," ENEC Chief Executive Mohammed Al-Hammadi said in a statement. ENEC plans to build the Gulf Arab state's first reactors at Braka, a sparsely populated site on the Gulf coast near the border with Saudi Arabia. It aims to have the first reactor running in 2017. The UAE is set to get 20 percent of its power from nuclear energy by 2020, when the last of four units at the Baraka reactor in Abu Dhabi are due to be finished. This important shift in the country's energy strategy is proceeding according to plan, as the UAE embraces nuclear technology without all the fury that some other states in the region have attracted. Nuclear power became the only viable option for the UAE as its population is expected to eventually double from its present 6.5 million, and the gas supplies will not be able to keep up when the demand for power goes up from under 16,000 megawatts at present to more than 40,000 MW by 2020. The first unit is scheduled to come on stream May 1, 2017.
