The reactor vessel for Unit 1 of El Dabaa was installed in November 2025, during a joint ceremony attended via video link by the presidents of Russia and Egypt. The milestone marks the transition from civil construction to the assembly of the actual nuclear components.
The component — a 330-tonne vessel manufactured at the Izhora plant in St. Petersburg — arrived at the Egyptian site in late October, following 41 months of fabrication. Rosatom stated that the vessel has a design lifetime of 60 years, extendable to 80. That’s not all: new welding technologies announced in February 2025 aim to extend the operational life of VVER-1200 reactors to as much as 100 years. For El Dabaa Unit 2, welding operations on the upper semi-vessel had already been completed that same month.
The plant is located on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, approximately 320 kilometres north-west of Cairo. It will feature four advanced third-generation VVER-1200 units, each rated at 1,200 MW, for a total installed capacity of 4,800 MW. Construction of the first reactor began in July 2022; the other three units followed in near-parallel, with first concrete poured for all of them by January 2024. As of September 2025, the site employed 25,000 workers, with all four units targeted for commissioning by 2030.
The project is valued at $28.75 billion. Rosatom’s role extends well beyond construction: it will supply nuclear fuel for the plant’s entire operational life, deliver spent fuel storage containers, and support Egyptian partners with personnel training and maintenance for the first ten years of operation. In January 2025, Egypt’s nuclear authority obtained a licence to build an on-site dry spent fuel storage facility with a custody capacity of up to 100 years. A fuel purchase order and a broader cooperation agreement were both signed at the ceremony marking the vessel installation.
El Dabaa will be Egypt’s first commercial nuclear power plant and the first built on the African continent since Koeberg in South Africa, which entered service nearly four decades ago. The message it sends to the rest of the continent is tangible: a middle-income country can integrate nuclear energy into its power mix, through a model that combines external financing, skills transfer, and a multi-decade industrial roadmap. If the schedule holds, Africa will have two operating nuclear plants by the end of the decade — and that is no small thing.
