Egypt Plans to Start Mining Uranium in 2024
Egyptian soldiers stand as the Egyptian flag is raised on the BPC Anwar el Sadate military cruise ship during the flag ceremony on September 16, 2016 in Saint-Nazaire, western France
CAIRO (Sputnik) – Egypt plans to start mining crude uranium in 2024 as part of the country’s rapidly developing program for peaceful use of nuclear energy, Amr El-Hag Ali, chairman of the Egyptian Atomic Energy Authority (EAEA), said on Tuesday.”We will start mining crude uranium in 2024 with the help of Egyptian experts and ideas,” El-Hag told the Capital Broadcasting Center.Since crude uranium cannot be used in nuclear power plant reactors, Cairo will have to send it to other countries for processing, the EAEA chief noted. At the same time, Egypt owns one of the nine plants for the production of nuclear fuel in the world, El-Hag said. This will allow Cairo to save money, given that it is more expensive to import fuel than to produce it domestically, he added.”If we reach serious agreements, then we will probably be able to export nuclear fuel used for scientific reactors,” El-Hag told the broadcaster.He also said that Egypt needed highly qualified personnel to work in this sector.Egypt began exploration of uranium deposits back in 1965, with mines drilled in the Western Desert bordering Libya and in the Eastern Desert not far from the resort city of Hurghada.In 2015, Cairo signed an agreement with Moscow on cooperation in building Egypt’s first nuclear power plant (NPP) in the town El Dabaa, with the provision that Russia will advance a $25 billion loan for this purpose. In December 2017, the two countries also signed appendix to the agreement to activate commercial contracts for the NPP construction.In November 2022, Russian state nuclear agency Rosatom started building the second power unit of the El Dabaa NPP. The plant will consist of four power units of 1,200 MW each. They will operate on advanced Russian nuclear reactors VVER-1200 belonging to the 3+ generation, which meet the highest post-Fukushima safety standards.In November, Rosatom’s fuel company and the EAEA also signed a deal for the supplies of low-enriched nuclear fuel components to Egypt for its ETRR-2 research nuclear reactor located in the village of Inshas.
