Nuclear Monitor #933
M.V. Ramana
On November 18, 2025, the United States and Saudi Arabia “signed a Joint Declaration on the Completion of Negotiations on Civil Nuclear Energy Cooperation” that promised “a decades-long, multi-billion-dollar nuclear energy partnership” between the two countries, confirming “that the United States and American companies will be the Kingdom’s civil nuclear cooperation partners of choice” and promises to ensure “that all cooperation will be conducted in a manner consistent with strong nonproliferation standards”. Although there is much to be concerned about this agreement, one potential worry that is unlikely to materialize is a rapid buildout of nuclear plants in Saudi Arabia—thanks in part to the long history of efforts to establish a nuclear program in the country.
That history can be dated back to 1978, when the country entered into a multi-year Technical Cooperation Project entitled “Nuclear Energy Planning” with the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Atomic Energy Research Institute was established in 1988 to promote various nuclear technologies. Not much resulted from those projects and plans. The impetus for the latest round of efforts is the December 2006 meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council, when officials from these states announced that they intended to start a joint nuclear energy development program.
The first agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia dates back to May 2008 when the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding on nuclear energy cooperation. According to that agreement, the United States promised to assist Saudi Arabia “to develop civilian nuclear energy for use in medicine, industry, and power generation” while the latter “stated its intent to rely on international markets for nuclear fuel and to not pursue sensitive nuclear technologies, which stands in direct contrast to the actions of Iran”. The term “sensitive nuclear technologies” is code for the capacity to enrich uranium, the technology that is at the heart of the multi-decade dispute between the United States and Iran. That clause has also been a source of dispute with Saudi Arabia.
Plans to build nuclear reactors in Saudi Arabia go back to 2010 when the The King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (KA‑CARE) was established through a Royal decree. The following year, the “coordinator of scientific collaboration at KA-CARE” announced plans “to construct 16 nuclear power reactors over the next 20 years at a cost of more than 300 billion riyals ($80 billion)”. The same year, a KA-CARE report suggested that “work on the kingdom’s first nuclear reactor could start by 2014, for completion by 2020”. These announcements were welcomed by the nuclear industry, which was reeling from the impact of the Fukushima accident.
Progress in the last decade and a half has been slow at best, and mostly involves officials reiterating plans to build nuclear plants. For example, in September 2024, Saudi Minister of Energy declared at the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency “the Kingdom is moving towards utilizing nuclear energy and its radiation applications for peaceful purposes… including the construction of the first nuclear power plant in the Kingdom”. And it was exactly the same declaration once again the following year, in September 2025. The other development over the same period involved Saudi Arabia signing a series of agreements with other countries and their nuclear agencies, including Argentina, France, Russia, China, and South Korea.
Saudi Arabia is also reported to have shortlisted two sites on the coast near the UAE and Qatari borders for nuclear construction. KA-CARE has since entered into a contract with the French company Assystem to conduct site characterization and impact studies for the first nuclear power plant.
In 2017, KA-CARE announced that it was soliciting nuclear capacity proposals with a combined capacity of roughly 2.8 GW from China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. During the same year, Westinghouse was reportedly discussing a bid for two nuclear power reactor tenders in Saudi Arabia. By 2023, Saudi Arabia had reportedly received bids from Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO), China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), Russia’s state-owned Rosatom, and France’s EDF.
No U.S. company put in a bid. This was partly because, as the Congressional Research Service pointed out in September 2024, this could not happen “until the kingdom has a 123 agreement ‘in effect’; ‘has committed to renounce uranium enrichment and reprocessing on its territory under that agreement’; and has ‘signed and implemented’ an Additional Protocol with the IAEA”.
The Trump Administration seems to be upending that agreement. In April 2025, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright declared that it “has revived talks with Saudi officials over a deal that would give Saudi Arabia access to U.S. nuclear technology and potentially allow it to enrich uranium” that is meant to “enable the kingdom to develop a commercial nuclear power industry”. The November 2025 joint declaration is presumably a result of that revival of talks.
The interest shown by the Trump administration in furthering a nuclear agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia is not surprising. Even during his earlier stint as President, Trump and others in his administration had moved forward on providing nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, propelled in part by lobbyists pushing a deal, and insiders who stood to profit from the deal. This time around, there is much greater openness in how countries can use money to get the Trump administration to cut them a deal—and Saudi Arabia has promised to pay a trillion dollars.
Understanding the motivation
Money, and lots of it, is definitely one motivation for the United States, and other countries, wanting to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia. But what about Saudi Arabia’s intentions behind the interest in nucelar power.
According to the royal decree of 2010: “The development of atomic energy is essential to meet the Kingdom’s growing requirements for energy to generate electricity, produce desalinated water and reduce reliance on depleting hydrocarbon resources”. At that time, hydrocarbon resources produced nearly all of Saudi Arabia’s electricity—and they still do. Given concerns about climate change and economic diversification, switching away from hydrocarbons makes enormous sense. However, switching to nuclear energy does not.
Nuclear energy is among the most expensive ways to produce electricity. According to the Wall Street company Lazard’s 2025 estimates, electricity from a new nuclear power plant in the United States costs roughly three times the corresponding costs at solar or wind energy plants. Globally, the share of electricity from nuclear reactors has come down from 17.5 percent in 1996 to only 9 percent in 2024.
The contrast with renewables couldn’t be greater. In 2024, modern renewables (i.e., not including power from large hydroelectric dams) produced 17.3 percent of the world’s electricity, up from around 1 percent in the mid 1990s. Solar photovoltaics, especially when built at large (utility) scale, has become the least costly option for new electricity capacity in recent years; in 2020, the International Energy Agency pronounced that solar is “the new king of the world’s electricity markets”. In the United States, the levelized cost of electricity from utility scale solar photovoltaics and wind energy have declined by roughly 84 percent and 55 percent respectively over approximately this period.
According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Saudi Arabia has expanded its renewable energy capacity during this period, from 2 MW in 2010 to 4743 MW in 2024. The bulk of the renewable capacity is solar energy, which had a total capacity of 4340 MW. But, according to the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, in 2024, Saudi solar and wind power plants generated only 8.2 TWh and 1.6 TWh respectively, a paltry 2.2 percent of the total electricity produced in the country.
This low share of electricity is at odds with two realities: Saudi Arabia has high levels of solar irradiance, with studies showing that “photovoltaic technologies would perform well at any location” in the country. And, Saudi Arabia has been successful at commercial solar projects; in 2024, it achieved a new global record for the lowest levelised cost of electricity from a solar photovoltaic project.
All of this suggests that Saudi Arabia should be just pouring financial resources and political capital into accelerating solar energy, and not even bother with developing nuclear energy. Unless there is some other motivation.
A not-so-hidden purpose?
One attribute of nuclear energy that “its advocates, for the most part, avoid mentioning” is “its innate and inseparable connection to nuclear weapons, and more generally, to the military”. The earliest nuclear reactors were, after all, built not to generate electricity but to produce atomic weapons.
And something along these lines has been mentioned by the most powerful individual in Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In March 2018, MBS explained the context for the Saudi interest in nuclear technology in an interview with CBS News:
CBS: Does Saudi Arabia need nuclear weapons to counter Iran?
MBS: Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb, but without a doubt if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.
It is certainly possible that Saudi Arabia’s desire to develop a nuclear bomb “as soon as possible” is a powerful motive for the country’s interest in nuclear energy. But unambiguous proof of that interest is unlikely to become visible for decades. As was the case with India, which set up its Atomic Energy Commission in 1948 ostensibly for “peaceful” purposes but tested its first nuclear weapon in 1974, and then a range of weapons in 1998. Absence of proof is not proof of absence, and it is better to be safe than sorry.
