Table of Contents

Introduction ............................................................................... 3
Problem statement .................................................................. 3
Objectives ................................................................................ 4
Literature review .................................................................... 4
Methodology............................................................................. 10
Result ........................................................................................ 12
Discussion ................................................................................. 18
References ................................................................................ 19
Introduction
Nuclear energy is the usage of heat released from atoms splitting inside the
reactor to generate steam and the steam then rotate the turbines similar to
conventional thermal power plant to generate electricity. It is one of low
carbon power generation sources among solar and wind and it provide
sustainability and reliability to the power grid because it is available 24/7.

However, there is Conflicting views of the usage of nuclear energy

worldwide and especially in Saudi Arabia due to its vital consequences to
the environment and to the people in case of failure or accident.

This chapter covers first why it is important to consider nuclear power

plants as a component of the Saudi Arabia national grid, the secondly it
discusses the research objectives and finally presents the previous work of
research on the same issue.

Problem statement
Saudi Arabia countries considering building nuclear power plants to
support their electricity demand and prevent future generation shortages
and reduce carbon dioxide emissions to meet the Paris agreement. it is right
to ask if building nuclear power plants applicable in Saudi Arabia and is it
beneficial?.
Objectives
this research is aiming to show how effective nuclear power is to satisfy
the annually increasing demand in the Saudi Arabia.

Literature review
Clean, safe and inexpensive energy is needed to support the future energy
demand of the world especially in the Arab world where the demand is
increasing annually by 8.9% triple the world increasing amount(1). The
world energy council estimate the GCC need for 100,000 MW of additional
power for the next 10 years and 200,000 MWe by 2030(1). The objective
of this paper is to review the current and future potential of nuclear energy
and to examine its ability to support the future economic development in
the GCC and medal east region. the interests of GCC countries in nuclear
energy is logical and timely decision and achievable goal of these countries
to take advantage of nuclear power to secure 30% of their future need for
electricity and seawater desalination and it is equivalent to build 2 of
1500MW nuclear power plants each year starting in 2016, each reactor
energy could be divided between generating electricity 39% , seawater
desalination 25%, process steam 20%. It would create more future jobs and
economic growth with low greenhouse gas emissions but it facing many
issues to be dealt with like availability of highly trained personnel,
investment of the exploration of uranium, and development of nuclear
waste disposal strategy (1).

The increasing electricity demand in Saudi Arabia may cause future

problems in oil export and in CO2 emissions where it recorded 530 million
tons of carbon dioxide emission in 2015 (18), and currently Saudi Arabia
planning to introduce nuclear power to solve future crisis. The selection to
proper site for nuclear power plant is primary measure according to IAEA.
The aim of this paper is trying to identify the proper sites for building
nuclear power plant in Saudi Arabia. Potential areas were examined using
geographical information system GIS based multi-criteria decision-making
approach and nine criteria were used to exclude unproper site for nuclear
power plant construction. After excluding all the non-suitable places for
nuclear power plant construction the result where all in the east and west
coast because the cooling water available only in the sea and in all the areas
where at most 32 Km form the sea, for the western coast the suitable are is
38% of the total area and for the eastern coast the suitable area is 68% of
the total area with aggregate area of 34,868 . The finding of suitable
place for nuclear power plant construction which is the first phase of what
the International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA suggested and could
enhance the next two phases which are screening (potential sites) and
evaluation (comparison and ranking sites) respectively (2).

Locations of nuclear power plant should be selected in places where it

reduces the probability of radiation leakage due to accidents and also to
reduce the cost of plant integrated with electrical grid. This study aim is to
apply the technical capabilities of geographical information system to build
geographical data base and data processing and analysis to help the
decision-making process when choosing the best place for nuclear power
plant. This study applied the spatial suitability analysis approach based on
the multi-criteria decision-making method to the most fitting area for
nuclear power plant. After excluding many sites the resulted suitable sites
for building nuclear power plans were selected in west coast including one
site each : Umluj, Duba, Yanbu, Al-Lith, and Baysh and six in Rabigh and
in the east coast: three sites in the Al-Adaid Governorate and one site in
Al-Ahsa. Using spatial suitability analysis approach the most suitable
places for nuclear power plants were identified, and it is recommended to
invest in these specific areas to build the plants for generation of electricity
(3).

Saudi Arabia is expected to have energy shortage with the existing energy
system in 2025 and could postponed to 2035 due to highly increasing
demand one of major factors is desalination where it consumes almost 40%
of the gas production. This paper present optimal long-term strategy to
interduce nuclear power in Saudi Arabia by evaluating three scenarios. The
Saudi Arabian energy system simulated three scenario using MESSAGE
first scenario where the is no change to the energy system second where
the existing power plants are Rehabilitated and final one introducing
nuclear power plants to the energy system, energy planning tool also
G4ECONS tool was applied to calculate and compare the levelized cost of
diffrent types of nuclear generation. The findings were for first scenario
the electricity shortage rate started at 27% in 2025 and reach up to 96% in
2050, where in the second scenario the electricity shortage rate will be
mitigated to 6.8% in 2040 and reach 33.8% by 2050, for the third scenario
and its three sub scenarios the electricity shortage was completely resolved
and moreover the desalinated seawater from the SAMRT-100 reactor
would be responsible for more than 80% of water demand in 2050. It was
shown in this paper that introducing new power generation technologies
including nuclear is essential to be able to generate electricity for the
growing demand in the future in Saudi Arabia (4).
The United Arab Emirates UAE is building nuclear power plants in
Barakah to generate electricity and they willing to operate it on the highest
level of safety so establishing radiological baseline database is essential to
monitor the surrounding radiation concentration and to control the public
exposure and the environmental impact. The goal of this study is to
determine the activity concentrations of gamma-emitting natural
radionuclides in shore, soil and bottom sediments around the Barakah
nuclear power plant and also to determine the ratio. For low-
background radio-analysis, gamma-ray spectrometry (model no.
GMX40P4-76) was used, And In order to determine the isotopic
composition of uranium, alpha spectrometry (model no. 7401VR) was
used. The resulted values indicate that all the radioactive activities is under
the world average threshold 33 set by UNSCEAR, except in S11 64.82

which is already excluded as an outlier. This study proves that all the

concentration levels is below the average level and hence there is no trace
of human causes pollution on the surrounding of the nuclear power plant
(5).

Although paper above is not fully related to the core of the problem this
research trying to solve but it proves one point regarding the safety of
nuclear power plant operation in the GCC where it is actually operating in
that area and it is highly safe and less emitting radioactive material than
the world standard.

In 2020 Barakah nuclear plant was connect to the grid and start operating
and suppling electrical energy, so for safety reasons it essential to assess
the radiological of the radioactive release and the public exposure during
operation. This study calculates the radioactive release in its gaseous form
during operation. To calculate the radioactive releases GALE code was
used which is consist of four codes that compute gaseous and liquid
effluent discharges from Pressurized Water Reactors and Boiling Water
Reactors, after that the HOTSPOT code is used to simulate the radiological
dispersion, including the public exposure and Total Effective Dose
Equivalent , HOTSPOT code use gaussian dispersion model to provide
near-surface and short-term releases also provide the short-range
dispersion ,then gaussian model was used to estimate the radioactive
release. The highest does resulted was 4.1E-6 Sv/y for noble gases mixture
at 300 m away from the power plant and this amount is below the the
annual limits of the order of 10
exposure of the public. After calculating Total Effective Dose Equivalent
values it is shown that the numbers are less than the regulated limits (7).

The earlier paper is almost like (5) but the difference between them that
this one is more of simulation of the values not field samples like the (5)
and both of them prove that the nuclear power plants in the GCC are
operating in safely manner. Same logic goes with (6) paper were the
samples were collected using Ultra-sensitive hyper pure Germanium but it
used different method than the one was used in (5) it used X-ray diffraction
mineralogy (XRD) to analyzed the samples but the results were similar and
the hazard indices were less than the worlds average.

Paris agreement conclude on the need to limit the global temperature below
1.5 C thus governments have urgent need to fulfill the agreement and
implement the renewable energy sources to assess every renewable energy
technology available in terms of its cost and its flexibility. This paper show
the reader the importance of nuclear power plants as key contributor of
renewable energy sources to be able to reach zero net greenhouses gases
GHG emission and how it is very hard to reach that stage without nuclear
energy by 2050. The method used is comparing the low emission
renewable energy sources including nuclear power plants against eight
criteria's some of it is Safety, risk to human health, Resilience against
hazards, Environmental aspects and economics. He found out that The
Environmental aspects is nuclear power plants strongest feature where it is
the lowest GHG emission in both renewable and conventional power
sources, the nuclear power plants scored the least harmful source in the
fourth criteria among all energy production sources and on safety he states
that the risk is very low and probability of an accident it is less than

per year per reactor and the consequence for small reactors nonsignificant.
Thus the author conclude that Paris climate meeting target will not be met
if without the utilizations of nuclear power plants and it is the only low
emissions technology that is proven, scalable and economically practical
(8).
Methodology
To be able to evaluate the scenario of nuclear power adoption to the
electrical grid and its performance to the future demand there is a lot of
models to pick from (9) and (10) . First the high cost models were excluded
e.g. (LEAP , energyPRO, MARKAL/TIMES, EMCAS ,EMPS ) and
WASP which only free to the IAEA country members which the Saudi
Arabia are not , then the models that does not include nuclear were also
exclude e.g.(H2RES ,INVERT , UniSyD3.0) , also the complicated that
require months of training are not included like MiniCAM. The remaining
are tow models MESSAGE and OSeMOSYS. MESSAGE is great model
but the free source version has a lot of code bugs that prevent from using
it and the final model remining is OSeMOSYS which will be used(11,12).

Before modeling the energy system, the reference energy system has to be
drawn including all the technologies that participate to deliver the energy
from the source to its final destination. And in order to draw such a
sophisticated system simplification is necessary, so every energy source
that does not contribute to electricity generation is excluded.

To ab able to have an overview of the energy flow of Saudi Arabia energy

balance was used to get the data on the energy flow.

The figure 1,2 were taken into account to draw the energy system, the
figure 1 and 2 shows the energy system balance of Saudi Arabia starting
from the production of primary source until it reaches its final destination
Figure 1 Saudi Arabia energy balance (19)
Figure 2 Saudi Arabia energy balance (20)
Taken these system balances into account an overall simple system
representation of Saudi Arabia energy system was built as shown in figure
3.

Each line in figure 3 represent an energy carrier either Oil or natural gas or
HFO or electricity and each box represent technology. A technology in
OSeMOSYS any component of the system that consumes or produces or
convert an energy carrier (11).

in figure 3 the energy flows from left hand side all the way to consumer in
right hand side going through 5 stages, starting in resources stage were the
energy carrier is in reserves after that energy carrier is extracted it goes
from the resource stage to the primary energy stage. Then the primary
energy carried get into the refinery to be converted to another energy
carrier in the secondary stage after that the energy carrier enters the power
plant and is converted to electricity after that the electricity goes from the
secondary stage to transmission stage then it delivered to the consumer in
the demand stage,.

Saudi Arabia uses natural gas or oil to produce electricity in all of its power
plants as in (21) and has only two renewable energy sources solar
photovoltaic and wind turbines.
Figure 2 Saudi Arabia simplified reference energy system
The is two scenarios to be modeled using OSeMOSYS model:

I. The energy system without nuclear power plant

II. The energy system with nuclear power plant

To able to calculate the energy system operation the future electric demand
must be taken into consideration and the taken is this thesis is the study
done by KAPSARC (22) that project average demand increase by 1.6% per
year between 2019 until 2030. Table 1 list the electricity demand values
from 2019 to 2030 and due to model only using Peta joule as input unit the
conversion from TWh to PJ was must as shown in Table 1.

Year Demand

20## TWh PJ

19 303.9872 1094.354

20 308.851 1111.864

21 313.7926 1129.653

22 318.8133 1147.728

23 323.9143 1166.092

24 329.0969 1184.749

25 334.3625 1203.705

26 339.7123 1222.964

27 345.1477 1242.532

28 350.67 1262.412

29 356.2808 1282.611

30 361.9813 1303.133

Table 1 the projected electricity demand from 2019-2030 (22)

Result

As shown in figure 3 the three types generate electricity to satisfy demand

with 70.1 % of the generation will be covered by the natural gas and HFO
which is described as fossil fuel power plants and 24.5% will be generated
from the renewables power plants and the nuclear power plants will
generate 5.4% of the total electricity.
renewable power plants fossil fuel power plants nuclear power plant
Figure 3 the power generation by the power plant types
Discussion

As can be seen from figure 3 that the nuclear energy power plants is not
crucial in the supplying the electricity demand were it is only responsible
for 5.4% of the total electricity demand and the it can replaced by
renewable power plants such as PV CSP or wind and also increasing the
natural gas production to be bale to supply the electricity to cover the
nuclear power plant.
References

1. El-Genk, Mohamed S. "Nuclear Power in the Gulf Cooperation

Council (GCC) States: Promise, Strategies and Challenges," 2008.

2. Damoom, Mohammed M., et al. "Potential areas for nuclear power

plants siting in Saudi Arabia: GIS-based multi-criteria decision-
making analysis," Progress in Nuclear Energy 110 (2019): 110-120.

3. Al Osaimi, N.M. and M.D. Qoradi, "Candidate site selection for

nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia using GIS," Arabian Journal
of Geosciences, 2020. 13(22): p. 1218.

4. Esmail, S.M.M. and J.H. Cheong, "Studies on Optimal Strategy to

Adopt Nuclear Power Plants into Saudi Arabian Energy System
Using MESSAGE Tool," Science and Technology of Nuclear
Installations, 2021. 2021: p. 8818479.

5. Al Rashdi, Mouza Rashid, et al. "Radiological baseline around the

Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, UAE," Arabian Journal of
Chemistry 14.5 (2021): 103125.

6. Almeqbali, Ali S., George Karani, and Sayed A El-Mongy. "Nuclear

Power Plants Pre-Operational Radiological Monitoring Mapping for
the Coastal Boarders and Islands of the United Arab Emirates
(UAE)," JOURNAL OF ADVANCES IN PHYSICS 19 (2021): 31
39.

7. Zubair, M., E. Ahmed, and D. Hartanto, "Estimation of public

exposure during normal operation of unit-1 Barakah Nuclear Power
Plant using GALE and HOTSPOT," South African Journal of
Chemical Engineering, 2022. 41: p. 235-243.

8. Rogner, H-Holger and Budnitz, Robert and McCombie, Charles and

Mansouri, Noura and Schock, Robert and Shihab-Eldin, Adnan,
"Keeping the Nuclear Energy Option Open," (February 3, 2021).
USAEE Working Paper No. 21-488.
9. IAEA. "IAEA Tools and Methodologies for Energy System
Planning and Nuclear Energy System Assessments," International
Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, 2009.

10. Connolly, D., et al., "A review of computer tools for analysing the
integration of renewable energy into various energy systems,"
Applied Energy, 2010. 87(4): p. 1059-1082.

11. Moksnes, Nandi, et al. "2015 OSeMOSYS User Manual," KTH

Royal Institute of Technology (2015).

12. Howells, M., et al., "OSeMOSYS: The Open Source Energy

Modeling System: An introduction to its ethos, structure and
development," Energy Policy, 2011. 39(10): p. 5850-5870.

13.Garrick, B.J., "Nuclear Power: Risk Analysis," 2013.

14. " Electricity Consumption by Sectors," Saudi Central Bank, October

13, 2022, https://datasource.kapsarc.org/

15. "Annual Electricity Consumption for Saudi Arabia," opendata ,

August 7, 2022 , https://data.gov.sa/Data/en/dataset/annual-
electricity-consumption-for-saudi-arabia/resource/211982bd-fcbe-
4bc5-9db4-8f4228b7a0e5

16. " Electric power consumption (kWh per capita) - Saudi Arabia," The
world bank , 2014
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?end=2
014&locations=SA&start=1971&view=chart

17. "Electrical energy statistics" , General Authority for Statistics ,

kingdom of Saudi Arabia, November 23, 2020 ,
https://www.stats.gov.sa/en/1042

18. "Saudi Arabia - Countries & Regions," IAEA , September 27, 2020,
https://www.iea.org/countries/saudi-arabia
19. "Saudi Arabia energy balance", IEF and KAPSARC ,
https://apps.kapsarc.org/appboard/ebalance
20. "Saudi Arabia energy balance", IEA, 2020
https://www.iea.org/sankey/#?c=Saudi%20Arabia&s=Balance
21. " Electricity Generation by Station Capacities in Saudi Arabia",
KAPSARC, 2022, https://datasource.kapsarc.org/
22. Salaheddine Soummane, Frédéric Ghersi ," Projecting Saudi
Sectoral Electricity Demand in 2030 Using a Computable General
Equilibrium Model" , KAPSARC , 2021. P. 15