President Adly Mansour announced on 7 November 2013 that Egypt was restarting its nuclear power program in El Dabaa; a deal was reached with the residents in which it was agreed that a residential area will also be built.
[1] The Egyptian minister of electricity, Ahmed Emam, has called the project "necessary" because of a small amount of renewable energy sources and not enough fuel.
[2] The Egyptian nuclear power program was started in 1954 as the first research reactor ETRR-1 was acquired from the Soviet Union in 1958 and was opened by Gamal Abdel Nasser at Inchass, Nile Delta.
Also, the Nuclear Power Plants Authority (NPPA) was established in 1976, and in 1983 the El Dabaa site on the Mediterranean coast was selected.
El Dabaa had been targeted by protesters who were claiming that their land was wrongly taken by the government to make way for the nuclear plant.
[23][20][27] In March 2001 and July 2002, the IAEA was investigating on the environmental samples which was taken from the ETRR-1's hot cells that revealed traces of actinides and fission products, which was explained by Egypt in July 2003, that the presence of the particles was attributed by a damaged nuclear fuel cladding resulted in contamination of the reactor water that penetrated the hot cells from irradiated sample cans.
[20][27] Egypt also declared that, at the end of the 1970s, it concluded several contracts with a foreign company to build the Hydrometallurgy Pilot Plant (HPP) and in 1982, laboratory 2 became operational.
The Hydrometallurgy Pilot Plant designed for conducting bench scale radiochemistry experiments involving the separation of plutonium and uranium from irradiated fuel elements of the ETRR-1 research reactor.
In November 2004 and January 2005, Egypt acknowledged that, in 1987, it had carried out acceptance tests in the HPP using unirradiated uranyl nitrate in chemical reagents purchased on the local market while the uranyl nitrate had been mixed with a solution obtained from the dissolution of domestically produced scrap UO2 pellets (with 1.9 kg of uranium compounds).
Egypt did not declare it to the IAEA for safeguarding, due to the fact that the facility was never completed and it was designed for bench scale experiments.