The UAE’s Nuclear Energy Model: A Blueprint to Bypass Ambiguity

Spotlight 

• An amalgam of energy security, economic security, and environmental security impulses underwrites the UAE’s motivations for the pursuit of nuclear energy.
• The UAE’s pursuit of nuclear energy is an instructive case at a time of growing interest in the form, particularly in the Middle East.
• The country’s systemic integration of guardrails against both accidents and proliferation pathways offer a template of a viable and replicable model for countries that seek to integrate nuclear energy into their national energy portfolios. 

The Energy, Economy, and Environment Rationale for Nuclear

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) began considering the adoption of civilian nuclear energy through a white paper, “Policy of the United Arab Emirates on the Evaluation and Potential Development of Peaceful Nuclear Energy,” in 2008, following a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) consultation on the subject in 2006. The rationale for a hydrocarbon-rich country such as the UAE pursuing civilian nuclear energy lies in the growing energy demand of its economy, which was projected in 2008 to exceed 40,000 MW by 2020. Efforts to meet these demand impulses by using the country’s substantial oil reserves would levy a significant opportunity cost on an economy seeking to diversify, given the value of those barrels as a revenue-earning commodity. The aim of reducing the country’s domestic consumption of its export-oriented oil resources also aligned with the UAE’s national objective of adopting cleaner forms of energy with lower emissions to underwrite its increasing industrial and commercial consumption needs. Additional environmental considerations regarding increased oil consumption were similar to those associated with the potential use of coal as baseload fuel to generate the required electricity.

Efforts to meet these demand impulses by using the country’s substantial oil reserves would levy a significant opportunity cost on an economy seeking to diversify, given the value of those barrels as a revenue-earning commodity.

The UAE, of course, also had the choice of using natural gas instead of oil. However, despite the economic and environmental logic underpinning its use, the UAE’s reserves of natural gas are insufficient to meet its needs. It presently imports the majority of its natural gas requirements from Qatar through the Dolphin pipeline. This exposes the Gulf country to eventual import dependence, even though the supplier is a GCC partner. Given these considerations, the UAE needed a viable alternative form of energy to add to its energy basket. Nuclear energy offered an avenue to avoid the loss of lucrative export earnings while also offering clean baseload energy to meet the country’s growing consumption needs.

The climatic conditions and water scarcity that the UAE grapples with offer a compelling argument for the increased integration of nuclear energy into its energy portfolio. Uninterrupted desalination is foundational to the UAE’s way of life. The lower Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCoE) of nuclear energy and its suitability to the salinity levels of the region’s water also position it as a viable option for the Emirates’ desalination needs. Again, nuclear energy’s ability to provide baseload electricity helps stabilise the national grid in a manner that facilitates the adoption of renewables by addressing the element of intermittency that forms of energy like solar and wind are commonly plagued with. While the improvement in storage modules has enhanced the inclusion of renewables into the national energy portfolio, nuclear energy further mitigates the element of intermittence from the calculation.

Similarly, guaranteed baseload energy generation is also central to the country’s ongoing and future ambitions for data-centre-led digitisation ecosystems and decarbonisation. Nuclear energy can reduce some of the pressure on the local grids that are projected to be strained by growing demands of energy-intensive data centres that stand at the heart of the UAE’s ambitions of economic diversification.

While the improvement in storage modules has enhanced the inclusion of renewables into the national energy portfolio, nuclear energy further mitigates the element of intermittence from the calculation.

In addition to its salience to the country’s pursuit of the digital revolution and the opportunities related to it, nuclear power could also facilitate a transformation and expansion of its existing economic model by generating baseload and, crucially, clean energy to produce low-carbon aluminium or ‘green steel’—both significant elements of the UAE’s industrial ecosystem. This could help the country navigate the changing dynamics of global trade that has to contend with regulatory trade systems better today, by making its products compliant and competitive within regimes such as the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).

Once the rationale for the adoption of nuclear energy, based on its ability to meet these growing demands, was established, the country’s approach to integrating the form into its national energy portfolio through a systemic effort emphasising its peaceful motivations gained pace. 

Instituting the Nuclear Programme 

The UAE began laying the foundations for its nuclear industry through the establishment of the Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation (FANR) and the Emirates Nuclear Energy Company (ENEC). These regulatory steps and resultant institutions led to the establishment of the first civilian nuclear energy programme in the Arab world. The UAE established the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP), comprising four Advanced Pressure Reactors (APR-1400 MWe), two of which went critical in March 2020 and the remaining two in September 2021.

As a new entrant to the field, the UAE had multiple gaps to fill to build its civil nuclear enterprise, particularly those arising from a lack of local resources in technology, reactor construction, plant operations, waste management, and skilled personnel.

Table 1: Features of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) 

Source: Author’s own based on ENEC and IAEA data.

As a new entrant to the field, the UAE had multiple gaps to fill to build its civil nuclear enterprise, particularly those arising from a lack of local resources in technology, reactor construction, plant operations, waste management, and skilled personnel. It is a path the country has navigated by building robust international partnerships and ensuring compliance with international nuclear energy protocols aligned with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) mandates.

Table 2: The UAE’s Primary International Partnerships in Civil Nuclear Energy 

Source: Author’s own based on country-specific national nuclear energy status reports.

Integrating Systemic Accountability

Fundamental to the UAE’s nuclear energy narrative have been steps the country has taken regarding two issues in particular:

The first relates to building its credibility as an actor committed to the ethos of non-proliferation. Through its international commitments and its domestic regulatory positions on the issue, the country’s civilian nuclear program remains moored to the principle of non-proliferation. It is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has been an IAEA partner country since 1976. The UAE exists in a volatile strategic region, which has seen issues relating to both nuclear proliferation and siphoning of nuclear technology. In the framing and development of its civil nuclear program, therefore, the country has been cognisant of the need to delineate its own commitment to nuclear non-proliferation as clearly as possible. To this end, it has, among other regulatory safeguards, passed Federal Decree-Law No. (43) of 2021 which prohibits any proliferation-related activity. Along with the FANR, the Executive Office for Control and Non-Proliferation (EOCN) forms the regulatory backbone to prevent proliferation activities, including the unauthorised use or siphoning of dual-use material.

In addition to the policy commitments, it may be pertinent to consider a significant structural choice that the country made at the inception of its programme that demonstrates its intentions towards nuclear non-proliferation. The choice of reactors determines the trajectory that a country’s nuclear programme can be expected to take over decades. This is because, among other reasons, it is neither advisable nor easy to change the reactor type in a nuclear plant once it has been operationalised. This effectively creates a multi-decadal lock-in period of sorts. It is important, then, to consider the UAE’s choice of the Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) design over many others that were in the running, particularly the French option, given the country’s position as a legacy actor in the domain. KEPCO’s APR-1400 reactor has high burnup, which produces less weapons-grade plutonium-239 and uses low-enriched uranium dioxide fuel. This varies qualitatively from the implications of a cycle that may instead use, for instance, Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuel, a popular alternative that contains separated plutonium extracted via reprocessing—a weapons-usable material that could instantly have raised proliferation concerns. Feedstock from the South Korean partnership that the UAE consciously chose for Barakah, therefore, would not be structurally able to support any proliferation agendas, had they existed.

Feedstock from the South Korean partnership that the UAE consciously chose for Barakah, therefore, would not be structurally able to support any proliferation agendas, had they existed.

A second vertical of accountability has been built in through the building of a waste management ecosystem that is compliant with international protocols and open to scrutiny. Concerns regarding waste management are central to any nuclear-energy-generating operation. Notably, the radioactive nature of the waste from spent nuclear fuel is an issue that raises anxiety among both local populations and the international community. The Emirati nuclear programme was built on a clear delineation model of the responsibility they themselves would assume on this subject, and the role they would welcome for international partners to take on. Consequently, the UAE’s approach to waste management is based on two primary pillars. The first relates to the country having categorically eschewed, through international commitments, the right to reprocess and enrich its spent fuel; the second is based on the country storing its nuclear waste in reactor pools for a period of 20 years (this may also be transferred to dry storage after six years) and storing radioactive waste in an interim on-site storage building.

Cumulatively, these two steps by the UAE represent a distinctive approach to the development of civil nuclear energy, factoring in both proliferation and waste management concerns. For countries in the region and beyond that appear to struggle with clarifying whether the motivations underlying their nuclear programmes are meant for civilian-use cases or not, the UAE offers a potential blueprint for developing such programmes efficiently, safely, and most importantly, peacefully.

Cauvery Ganapathy is Fellow, Climate and Energy, ORF Middle East.