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By Trend

Russia has launched a training program for Egyptian specialists, who will work in the country’s nuclear power sector, the Russian President’s special envoy for the Middle East and African countries, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said on Thursday, TASS reports.

Speaking at a round table on Russian-Egyptian relations as part of the International Economic Summit Russia-Islamic World KazanSummit, he said:

"I would like to mention the construction of the first nuclear power plant in Egypt under the Russian model."

Bogdanov said that the nuclear industry in Egypt will be created "almost from scratch."

"Besides generation of electricity the Egyptian economy and industry need so much, it will create thousands of new jobs," he added.

"At the preparatory stage, which took several years, the parties did a lot of work - from the development and adjustment of technical and financial parameters to the approval of important legislative decisions on the demand for economic and environmental security," Bogdanov said.

"We expect that the practical work on the project will start soon. We have just begun a very serious work which concerns training of Egyptian specialists to work at such facilities as the nuclear power plant," he said.

In March, Chief Executive Officer of the Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom Alexei Likhachev said that construction work at the Egypt’s El Dabaa nuclear power plant (NPP) can provisionally start in 2020.

Acts on entry of the El Dabaa NPP construction projects into effect were signed on December 11, 2017 in Cairo in presence of presidents of Russia and Egypt.

The two countries signed an inter-governmental agreement to construct the first nuclear power plant in El Dabaa in November 2015. The facility consisting of four power units with 1,200 MW capacity each, will be built near the city of El Alamein on Egypt’s northern coast, 3.5 kilometers away from the Mediterranean Sea. The launch of the first unit is expected in 2024. The total cost of the project is estimated at $30 bln.

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