A month before Egypt’s economic development conference in Sharm el-Sheikh drew billions of dollars-worth of investment commitments, a lower-profile deal was concluded that could prove as significant as any of the megaprojects unveiled at the summit in mid-March.

On 10 February, Egypt’s President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi met with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to sign a memorandum of understanding to cooperate on nuclear power.

Russia’s state-run nuclear company, Rosatom Overseas, signed an agreement with Egypt’s Nuclear Power Plants Authority (NPPA) to develop the design for a combined nuclear and desalination plant at El-Dabaa, a two-unit AES-2006 pressurised water reactor producing both electricity and water.

Significant capacity

The planned water desalination capacity is significant. Rosatom says the facility will be able to produce up to 170,000 cubic metres a day (cm/d) of water from a single unit, based on an input of 850 megawatt hours (MWh) a day of electricity. That would only be 2 per cent of the total 2,400MW capacity of the Nuclear Power Plant, although some cogeneration using waste heat is also envisaged.

The Egyptian-Russian agreement reflects growing global and regional interest in deploying nuclear energy to produce desalinated water. The motivation is clear.

Dual-purpose generation of both power and water offers improved thermodynamic efficiency as well as sizeable economic side-benefits. These are particularly appealing in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region, where several countries are looking to develop nuclear power programmes.

“The Mena region has obvious electricity and water needs, and it seems there is a lot of scope for bringing those together,” says Ian Hore-Lacey, director of public communications at the UK-based World Nuclear Association.

This is occurring in two main ways in the nuclear industry. One is through cogeneration, using waste heat from nuclear power generation to desalinate water. The other is to use reverse osmosis (RO) technology during off-peak periods in order to flatten out the reactor’s demand curve.

According to the Vienna-headquartered International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it is an obvious strategy to use power reactors that run at full capacity, with all the electricity applied to meeting grid load when demand is high and part of it used to drive pumps for RO desalination when demand is low.

“Producing power continually is most efficient and economical for a nuclear power plant,” says Hore-Lacey. “So when the demand is lower, then you use the power with RO.”

That, however, may not be sufficient to fully amortise the cost of an RO plant. Most likely in that case is a combination of cogeneration and offpeak RO.

Rosatom’s BN-350 fast reactor at Aktau, in Kazakhstan, supplied up to 135MW of electricity while producing 80,000 cm/d of potable water over some 27 years, with about 60 per cent of its power being used for heat and desalination. The plant was decommissioned in 1999.

Room for growth

Mostly, nuclear reactors have been used to desalinate on a small scale. According to the IAEA, 10 desalination facilities linked to pressurised water reactors are operating in Japan, yielding 14,000 cm/d of potable water, while India and Pakistan have both commissioned demonstration nuclear desalination plants in recent years.

That still leaves significant room for growth for the nascent nuclear desalination market. The majority of the more than 7,500 desalination plants worldwide use fossil fuel-derived power, with all the attendant environmental and cost drawbacks that involves.

No surprise then that Egypt is not the only Mena state contemplating nuclear desalination. Two such units are also being considered by Iran in the expansion of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, again using Rosatom technology.

Meanwhile, the Russians are not the only ones to be touting for nuclear desalination business in the Middle East. South Korea signed a deal with Saudi Arabia in early March to conduct joint research into desalination technologies, with the intent of “minimising costs while maximising efficiency”.

Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute signed an agreement with King Abdullah City for Atomic & Renewable Energy (KA-Care) to assess the potential for building at least two South Korean SMART reactors (System-integrated Modular Advanced Reactor) in the kingdom. The advantage of SMART - considered a small-scale reactor at 100MW capacity - is that it is well-suited for desalination.

Small reactors

The relative small size of SMART-style reactors makes them applicable to the needs of individual Mena countries. With the US Navy nuclear-powered aircraft carriers desalinating 1,500 cm/d each for use onboard, the small-scale advantage is already evident.

There are other reasons why thinking small may appeal in the first instance. “Small reactors may be no more suitable than large reactors for desalination purposes, but the big advantage is that it is a much smaller bite of the cherry to build one,” says Hore-Lacey.

Saudi Arabia is soliciting interest from a broad range of technology providers able to deploy small-scale reactors with desalination capabilities. Also, in March, Taqnia, the technology arm of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, formed a joint venture with Argentina’s state-owned Invap to develop technology for the kingdom’s nuclear power programme, centring on small reactors such as the 100MW CAREM-25 reactor, which is designed for specific use in water desalination.

Jordan plans

Jordan too is keen to obtain desalination benefits from its wider nuclear energy strategy. In 2008, Jordan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) signed an agreement with Atomic Energy of Canada (AECL) and SNC Lavalin, also of Canada, to conduct a three-year feasibility study on building an AECL 740MW Enhanced Candu-6 reactor using natural uranium fuel, for both power and desalination purposes.

Since then, Amman has been looking at Russian technology. JAEC signed an inter-governmental agreement with Rosatom on 24 March that could pave the way for the construction of two nuclear power reactors with a total capacity of 2,000MW, at a cost of $10bn.

Rosatom, which in 2014 formed an expert council on desalination, views the opening of Mena markets such as Egypt and Jordan as a means to market its proven technological prowess in this field.

Top priority

“Efficient management of strategic water resources is becoming a top priority in many countries’ political agenda,” Evgeny Velikhov, a member of the council, told the Rosatom Overseas’ International Expert Council on Desalination meeting in Moscow in September 2014. “Russia has unique competencies and historical experience in using nuclear energy to produce fresh water by means of thermal desalination.”

However, Rosatom’s plants are large, rather than the small ones being considered by the likes of Saudi Arabia. “Russia seems only interested in selling large reactors at this point, but that could well change as they have got a couple of smaller reactors that are on the drawing board,” says Hore-Lacey. “You could see provision coming from a number of different quarters.”

Cost advantages

Above all, nuclear desalination could enjoy cost advantages over traditional hydrocarbons-based plants. According to an IAEA report from 2006 that was based on country case studies, costs would be in the range of 50 cents to 94 cents a cubic metre for RO, with a similar scale for multi-effect distillation (MED) and $1.2 to $1.5 a cubic metre for multi-stage flash (MSF) processes, with marked economies of scale.

An IAEA preliminary feasibility study on a nuclear desalination plant to be located at Skikda in Algeria was published earlier this year. Its finding, based on a series of different scenarios, was that the nuclear desalination option is more competitive, compared with desalination based on fossil energy.

As seawater desalination technologies evolve and more countries opt for dual-purpose integrated power plants, the need for advanced technologies suitable for coupling with nuclear power plants and leading to more efficient and economic nuclear desalination systems is clear, says the IAEA study.

New technologies

New technologies are expected to enhance the harvesting of waste heat in nuclear reactors. They may involve technologies related to MED rather than RO. The former is, for example, to be used in Rosatom’s proposed El-Dabaa nuclear power plant in Egypt, and MED was also used successfully at the Russian company’s Kazakhstan nuclear desalination plant.

Other technological opportunities relate to maximising heat recovery systems such as heat pipes, or the optimisation of the coupling configuration between nuclear reactors and desalination systems.

With Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran and others all considering nuclear desalination, whether of Russian, South Korean or Argentinian provenance, the Middle East may become a test bed for the roll-out of both tried and untested methods. Egypt has opted for large-scale, but it will be for others to judge whether the smaller reactors will deliver the required volumes of drinking water needed to keep pace with demand growth.

In the water-scarce Mena region, desalination is a necessity not a luxury. With the reduced availability of gas forcing governments to turn to other sources of energy, the desalination sector has to follow.