Bechtel provides support for nuclear plant

Engineering, construction and project management company Bechtel Group Incorporated has announced that it has been selected to provide design and project management support services to a subsidiary of the Korea Electric Power Corporation KEPCO during the construction of the first commercial nuclear power plant in the Middle East.

Bechtel will provide support services to KEPCO Engineering and Construction, which heads up a consortium selected to build four similar plants in the United Arab Emirates UAE.

Bechtel has a long experience in the nuclear power industry and has worked on more than 150 nuclear plants over the past 50 years. The company also has a long association with KEPCO dating back to the 1950s, when KEPCO commissioned Bechtel to build a nuclear power plant at Danginri in South Korea.

The first of the four proposed plants will be constructed at Braka, in the western region of Abu Dhabi, and is scheduled for completion in 2017. Bechtel will provide its services both at the construction site and also in Seoul for KEPCO E&C.

KEPCO headed the consortium that won the contract for the four nuclear plants in December 2009 from the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation ENEC against fierce competition from other bidders, notably from France and a combined United States-Japanese bid.

The nuclear plant will be the first in the Middle East and will enable the UAE to become the first among the Gulf Cooperation Council GCC countries to export nuclear generated energy through the GCC interconnected power grid.

According to the construction licence application filed by ENEC with the UAE Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation this week, the application is based on previous work carried out by KEPCO for reactors in South Korea, thus ensuring that the UAE plants will be "essentially the same" as the reactors in South Korea, which have been already been granted licenses in South Korea.

Member countries of the GCC have been attempting to diversify their economies from the rich hydrocarbon deposits and the Abu Dhabi nuclear power plant will be the first example of this diversification of power generation from oil- and gas-based generation.

Electricity consumption in the UAE was estimated to be about 15,000 MW in 2009 and is forecast to rise to as much as 40,000 MW by 2020. In a white paper issued in 2008, the government decided that nuclear power would be the preferred alternative to oil- and gas-fired facilities to meet the expected rise in demand.

The UAE's commercial nuclear energy program is being developed in accordance with the guidelines set down by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The UAE will purchase enriched uranium fuel from third parties, rather than carry out the enrichment process itself.

It is not clear at this stage if Bechtel will work on the remaining three reactors that are planned, but as the KEPCO consortium was awarded the contract for all four, it is a strong possibility, given Bechtel's long association with KEPCO.