AMMAN - The site of the country's first nuclear reactor has been relocated from Aqaba to the centre of the Kingdom, a senior energy official announced on Monday.
In a public forum yesterday, Jordan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) Chairman Khaled Toukan announced that energy officials have decided against a proposed site near Aqaba, which had been under consideration for over a year, citing construction costs.
"The new site will be in Majdal near Khirbet Al Samra in the central region... indicators so far look very positive," Toukan said at a national public information seminar on the nuclear programme.
Based on feasibility studies carried out by Belgian contractor Tractabel, JAEC has concluded that the seismic padding required to build on the original site, 20 kilometres outside Aqaba city, would have led to additional costs of "15 per cent per reactor unit".
In addition to seismic concerns, Toukan said grid connectivity issues also influenced the authorities' decision to relocate the preferred site for the power plant, slated to be a 1,000 megawatts (MW) Generation III reactor.
"The new location will be at the centre of the grid and electricity load, and electricity losses will be lower," Toukan told The Jordan Times on the sidelines of the seminar.
According to JAEC, the former site's proximity to the Kingdom's border with Saudi Arabia was also viewed as a potential liability.
The new site, 40 kilometres northeast of Amman and 15 kilometres away from Hashemite University, is a remote desert area in the Mafraq Governorate, far from residential areas, he said.
"We will be 20 kilometres away from any population centre," Toukan stressed.
JAEC originally chose the preferred site in Aqaba due to its proximity to the Red Sea, prioritising access to seawater for reactor cooling. Toukan said the new site, over 350 kilometres from the Kingdom's only coastline, will rely instead on water from the Khirbet Al Samra wastewater treatment plant near Zarqa.
According to initial studies, the total annual water requirement for the reactor will stand at 22 million cubic metres (mcm), he said, noting that a planned expansion of Khirbet Al Samra is expected to boost the treatment plant's capacity to 60mcm.
With the increased capacity, the wastewater treatment plant could provide enough water to cool three 1,000MW reactors on the site, with reactor cooling expected to be a less water-intensive process due to the desert's lower night-time temperatures.
"We will only need 22 million cubic metres. In Aqaba, we were preparing to use 100mcm; this makes a huge difference," he said.
Toukan indicated that the Majdal site is similar to the Palo Verde nuclear reactor in Arizona, one of the few nuclear power plants in the world located inland and in a desert climate.
In order to take advantage of the US experience in constructing and operating the 4,000MW plant, Toukan said two experts from Palo Verde were invited to the Kingdom last week in order to assess the new site.
With the decision, JAEC will request the three firms shortlisted to build the country's first reactor - Canadian AECL, Russian Atomstroyexport and French-Japanese consortium AREVA-Mitsubishi - to submit bid documents and price estimations based on the new site, according to Toukan.
The country's first nuclear reactor is to be constructed within the next decade, with plans for a second reactor devoted to water desalination some two years later.
© Jordan Times 2010
