Saudi Arabia Fast-Tracks Nuclear Power [View all]

[FBaggins]

Last Tuesday, energy officials in Saudi Arabia announced plans to become a major nuclear energy state, assuring the reactors would be used only for peaceful purposes (The Nuclear Wire). They intend to move fast, beginning construction by year’s end. The Saudi Royal Family hopes that nuclear will provide 15% of the Kingdom’s power (18 GWe) within 20 years, together with a similar 15% (40 GWe) from solar (WNN). They are planning to invest $80 billion to build over a dozen nuclear power plants as fast as possible, intending for the first reactor to come online in only eight years.

Investment in solar for the same energy production will take about $240 billion in investment, although breakthrough technologies in the next decade should cut that cost in half. Energy consumption in Saudi Arabia is growing faster than any other country in the Middle East, and almost all of it is fueled by oil and natural gas. Total electricity consumption in Saudi Arabia exceeds 200 billion kWhs per year and is expected to double by 2030 (Gulf Research Center).

Americans are not generally aware that the two largest uses of power in the Middle East are for desalinating seawater and residential cooling. Saudi Arabia desalinates over 250 billion gallons of seawater each year, and that number will double in the next ten years as the population and industrialization increase.

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Since Saudi Arabia burns almost a billion barrels of oil a year to produce electricity, this change in production is critical to their economic future. It is much more profitable to sell their oil and gas to China and the West instead of burning it for power. The cost of the oil used to burn to produce electricity is heavily subsidized by the government, which increases waste and inefficiency and is detrimental to their overall GDP. Saudi officials are worried that the present trend of increasing oil use in the Kingdom will hurt their economy in only a few short years, so this change is needed right now.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/09/08/saudi-arabia-fast-tracks-nuclear-power/