Al Saud said in a speech at the International Atomic Energy Agency conference in Vienna, said that “the site will be finalised after completion of the technical specifications documents, which were drafted through an international competition”.
In June, Saudi Arabia began the process of choosing a vendor for the construction of the oil-rich kingdom’s first commercial nuclear power station with bids likely to come from South Korea, France, China and Russia.
According to Dan Yurman, who writes the Neutron Bytes blog, Riyadh wants to build two 1,400 MW nuclear power plants, a down-sized effort from an ambitious goal set in 2014 to build 16 units of about 1,000 MW each.
Neutron Bytes said that at $5,000/kW, for benchmarking purposes, the cost of the two reactors would be $7bn (€7.2bn) each.
It is not clear where the proposed plants would be built. Saudi Arabia has considered three separate sites and as a practical matter it would be economically and logistically efficient to build both reactors at the same location.
Saudi Arabia does not have any commercial nuclear plants, but has expressed ambitions to build around 17 GW of nuclear energy after 2040. Nuclear power is expected to make Saudi Arabia independent of oil and diversify the energy mix.
In April, Saudi Arabia established a national nuclear energy company to develop and operate nuclear facilities. Riyadh said the Saudi Nuclear Energy Holding Company (SNEHC) will participate in nuclear projects locally and internationally.